2. What is Shared Reading?
•“Shared reading is a collaborative learning activity, based on research by Don Holdaway (1979),
that emulates and builds from a child’s experience with bedtime stories” (Parkes, 2000, p.1).
•Shared reading can be included into a teacher’s reading program to model a wide range of
reading strategies.
•Shared Reading can be implemented in a classroom setting in a number of ways to best fit the
grade level and students’ needs.
•It is an enjoyable and engaging reading experience that can be done in a whole group setting or
with small groups and involves student participation.
3. Primary Grades
•For kindergarten and first grade, shared reading is typically done with students gathered around
the teacher while reading from a big book or text written on chart paper.
•The academic focus is becoming familiar with books by having students “jointly read predictable
or repeated portions of the text, identify high-frequency vocabulary, and increase the awareness
of print concepts such as capitalization, punctuation, and word boundaries” (Stahl, 2012, p. 48).
•The repeated reading of a text can take place as a whole group, partners or independently.
Repeated reading helps children build fluency as well as confidence.
•Follow up activities can be used to extend the reading. These will focus on age appropriate skills.
4. Primary Grades
•By the end of first grade, big books should be
replaced by individual copies of texts for each
student. Chosen texts should be carefully
selected to reflect students’ development.
Picture books with more complex vocabulary
and age appropriate concepts are ideal for this
stage.
• Stahl suggests focusing on fluency,
comprehension and conceptual vocabulary.
• This phase of the primary process will last until
the beginning of third grade and then transition
to an intermediate focus of academics.
5. Intermediate Grades & Beyond
•As students grow as readers, the academic focus
of shared reading expands and the presentation
shifts to meet the needs of older students.
•Stahl suggests that in third grade and beyond,
shared reading should focus on comprehension,
high-level thinking, content acquisition and
conceptual vocabulary.
•Text options expand to include readings from a
wide array of sources such as novels, speeches,
textbooks and poetry.
•Teachers are encouraged to model cognitive
thinking while reading texts to support students’
growth.
6. Intermediate Grades & Beyond
•In Read Write Teach, Linda Rief shows that shared reading can carry on into middle school. She
provides an example of what shared reading looks like in later grades.
• Students and the teacher typically read together in a story theater fashion. Her lessons seem to focus
less on conventions and more on purpose and meaning.
• Rief encourages her students to take a more analytical approach to reading and think critically about
what they are reading, why it is an effective piece of literature and how they connect with it.
• “ First and foremost, I want kids to bring their own experiences, feelings, and imaginations to a piece of
literature – a play, short story, a poem, an editorial, a memoir – but I also want them to be able to think
out an idea that the writer may have been trying to get at based on the context and the way the story is
crafted” (Rief, 2014, p. 131).
7. Commonalities Across the Grade Levels
•Shared reading promotes the reading of challenging texts in all grade levels. The texts chosen
for shared reading may be slightly above students’ instructional reading levels. This is ideal
because teachers are present to offer support.
•It is beneficial to provide students with an overview of the story (book talk) before beginning to
read. It seems that “beginning with an overview of the story helped students make connections
to their prior knowledge, including links to other stories they had heard or read” (Koskinen,
Blum, Bisson, Phillips, Creamer & Baker, 1999, p. 434).
•Whether a student is listening to a teacher read a story from a big book or reading a chapter
from a novel with a group, students are required to follow along with the text.
•Shared reading is designed to be an enjoyable experience for students of all ages in hopes of
creating lifelong readers.
8. Commonalities Across the Grade Levels
•Technology can be incorporated during shared reading in all grade levels in order to enhance
instruction and students’ engagement.
• Interactive White Boards (IWB) can be a resource. “Using IWBs, such as the SMART board, teachers can
easily create enlarged texts and text manipulation activities for shared reading” (Gill & Islam, 2011, p.
225).
• Document Cameras can allow teachers to share pre-printed texts for all students to see. This is an ideal
tool for choral reading.
9. challenging texts
book talks
student participation
and interaction
designed to be
enjoyable
technology
Primary Grades
big books
specific academic focus
(identify high-frequency
vocabulary and increase
the awareness of print
concepts)
repeated reading
Intermediate Grades &
Beyond
focus on comprehension,
high-level thinking,
content acquisition and
conceptual vocabulary
read a wide array of texts
teacher models
advanced cognitive
thinking
In Short…
10. Works Cited
Gill, S., & Islam, C. (n.d.). Shared Reading Goes High-Tech. The Reading Teacher, 65(3), 224-227.
Koskinen, P. S., Blum, I. H., Bisson, S. A., Phillips, S. M., Creamer, T. S., & Baker, T. K. (1999).
Shared reading, books, and audiotapes: Supporting diverse students in school and at
home. Reading Teacher, 52(5), 430-444.
Parkes, B. (2000). Read it again!: Revisiting shared reading. Retrieved December 26, 2006 from
http://www.stenhouse.com/pdfs/0304ch01.pdf
Rief, L. (2014). Read, write, teach: Choice and challenge in the reading-writing workshop.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann
Stahl, K. (n.d.). Complex Text or Frustration-Level Text: Using Shared Reading to Bridge the
Difference. The Reading Teacher, 66(1), 47-51.
