Monday, May 28, 2012

Multi-Day/Repeated Read-Aloud

A powerful strategy to engage our younger learners in a text is the multi-day or repeated read-aloud.  While we usually read-aloud texts with students throughout the grades, many times we visit a text once, model what we need and move on to a new text.  This interactive strategy allows students to revisit a text, digesting one focus at a time, building their knowledge and understanding, allowing them to think and apply what they are learning to their own lives or other contexts.

While this strategy mirrors the shared reading structure, this is still more teacher controlled and at the highest level of teacher support for students.  We are able to chunk the different foci with a book and allow students the opportunity to interact and share their thoughts, in shorter time periods.  We are also able to embed time to enjoy a text, during the first reading, delving into the different foci after this initial reading.

During Jennifer's lesson, she is revisiting a text that the class has worked with, connected to seasonal changes and science.  This lesson is focused on finding words that the children don't know, and using the context clues and their prior knowledge to infer the meaning.  This work connects to prior lessons on inferring, and integrates some work with words and vocabulary development.  Notice how the students are interacting with the text and making meaning together.


For more information on multi-day read-alouds, also known as repeated read-alouds, visit the following site to view webcasts and related resources:  Kindergarten Matters: Planned, Purposeful and Playful Talk

Here is a professional article that shares more ideas about repeated read-alouds: 

This is a table from the article above, outlining the different components of the repeated interactive read-aloud:

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