Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Choral Reading

I really enjoyed trying choral reading in our class on Wednesday.  Even though it has been discussed in one of my CEP classes before, I do not think that I have ever actually tried it.  I liked being able to actually plan how we were going to do it (i.e. how it would be read, what would be read and by who) and then actually implementing it.  It was interesting to see all of the different ways that choral reading could be done with different books.

The handout that we were given in class (that we used as a guideline when discussion how our group would implement the choral reading for our book) was very useful and contained information that I was unaware of.  From the last time that I learned about choral reading, the book only discussed choral readings in small groups.  The students would simply pair up with another student and keep reading their section of the book.  Instead, this handout talked about the different ways in which the students and text can be organized and still be using choral reading.  Before this class, I was unaware of there being multiple ways in which choral reading can be done.

After trying this activity and enjoying it so much, I would like to see if I could try choral reading in my kindergarten field placement.  I think that this is something that the students would like to do because it would be something new and different.  The only type of choral reading that I see in the classroom right now is when the students are reading a book that has a repeating chorus.  The teacher simply reads the text that variates and then the students read the chorus line that repeats, in unison.  I think that the students would enjoy trying something other than this with different books that they do not usually read together.

2 comments:

Olivia J said...

Erica-both you and Jess mentioned that you would like to try choral reading in your placements. I think this is a good idea. It would be a great learning experience. More importantly, seeing why both of you would like to try choral reading causes me to want to also try it. However, my class rarely reads as a whole group so it would be difficult to try it.

Jessica Abbott said...

Like Olivia said, we both talked about wanting to try choral reading in our placements. My placement doesn't do a lot of whole class reading, but I think it would be an interesting thing to try with them. Like you said, it would be something new and different. I was thinking that especially the response type would be fun, because it makes it more like a game for the students.