Shared Reading of Predictable Books (continued)

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Children Learn Some Words as They Engage in Shared Reading

Imagine that you have read and reread Brown Bear, Brown Bear or any of the many favorite predictable books with your students. You have written the words on cards and let the children match the words to sentences in the book and build the sentences. You have done the Sentence Builder activity several different times, allowing different children to be different words. Children are going to learn some of the words. Many children will learn the concrete words that name the animals, such as bear, bird, and duck. They might also learn some of the color words, brown, red, and yellow. Because words are repeated in all the sentences, some children will learn some of the abstract connecting words, such as what, do, you, see, I, and at.

Emergent literacy research shows that children from literate homes have often experienced 1,000 hours of reading and writing before coming to school. Many of the books read to young children are predictable books that they insist on having read over and over and from which they learn some of the words. Shared reading simulates this experience and gives everyone the opportunity to encounter what reading feels like, to understand print concepts, and to learn to read some words.