Choral reading is actually something I have never learned much about. I knew what it meant, but I hadn't learned how to implement it or what the benefits of it were. I know we were really pressed for time on wednesday, but I would be interested in learning a little more about it. Are there are times it may be more beneficial to use choral reading, and are there are times it may not be as appropriate? I would also like to know what the benefits of using this style of reading may be, and if it is a method that may be difficult for students who are slow readers, or students who have trouble sounding out words. Is there an age range that this works better for?
Some of the the thoughts I had from what we learned were that choral reading is a way to teach kids about the rhythm, pitch, and other components of reading, Some students may not be familiar with when to raise their voice, or how to read in a steady rhythm, Choral reading would help these students learn these techniques through modeling, and encouraging them to speak similarly to the rest of the class. I also think choral reading would be beneficial for students with attention difficulties because they may be more intrigued by the reading if it does in a more interesting way, or if they are watching for the part where they speak versus the teacher speaking.
I enjoyed doing this activity because it allowed me to see what it was like to actually read in the choral reading style. As I said earlier, I knew what choral reading was for the most part, but I don't think you can really understand it until you have experienced it. After doing this activity, it made me think about the fact that not only have I never read chorally in the past 20 years of my education, but I have never observed choral reading in my placement. I hope that this is something I could maybe introduce to my classroom.
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3 comments:
Jess-I too had never learned more than just the basic facts about choral reading. I found this class very interesting. However, after I left the class, I never really questioned the idea of it. Looking at some of your questions, I agree that there is much more to be learned about choral reading.
I like your comment about modeling pitch, rhythm, etc. to the students. There is a chance that there will be students in our classrooms who have not picked up on how and when people raise their voice, for example. I think that it would be important, as a teacher, to draw students' attention to your pitch, rhythm, etc. outside of just choral reading. If the students are able to see/hear what you do and in what contexts, I think that it will help the students to use pitch, rhythm, etc. with choral reading.
Very thoughtful post! I'll try to address some of your questions. First, as a teacher, you pick what you want to teach first, then how. SO, for example, if you have a group of kids that you know will struggle to get the meaning of a text, choral reading might not be the best place to start. If you think they will easily understand the meaning or have already worked on the meaning, choral reading might be a way for them to work with expressive speech to convey meaning. A whole group of kids working together that struggle with decoding probably wouldn't be a good idea and would likely lead to frustration. A group with mixed abilities might do excellent things for the fluency of poor decoders because they have models in the group and have the opportunity to practice reading the same text several times. As for age, it depends on how independently you want them to do it. I think you can do it with jsut about any age, given an appropriate text and scaffolding.
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