One thing that we did that i thought was important was that each group got to figure out the proper way their group wanted to read their book. For older grades i think splitting students into groups and having them present their ideas is a good thing. It allows them to think of the different mechanics that go into choral reading and choose which ones would best suit their book. For the younger grades i think that it is good because the students can get the ideas of magnitude, rhythm, tone, pitch and the basic mechanics of choral reading. This will help them in future classes where choral reading assignments, like the ones we did in class, are implemented into the classrooms.
I wish that we had had more time in class to go over everything. Because we were rushing i feel as if i am still kind of lost on the subject of how exactly we implement choral reading into the classroom. Are we suppose to teach them pitch, rhythm, magnitude before we try reading a book out loud or are we just suppose to try it and see what happens.
4 comments:
Bri-I too really liked actually doing the choral reading in groups. I thought this was very beneficial. I also liked how we learned how our peers chose to implement choral reading with their book and group. However, I understand your concern about whether to teach the mechanics of reading first or read the book first. That is definitely something to think about. Maybe it just depends on your students or maybe you can mix it up reading first one time and then focusing on mechanics first the next time.
I agree with what you said about feeling rushed towards the end of class. I felt like there is so much you can learn about choral reading, and we didn't really get a chance to ask questions we may have had. Hopefully we will have a chance to ask some of these questions that we had so we can be more effective when implementing it in our own classroom.
I how you differentiated instruction based on age. I was considering doing this with my third graders, and I can't decide if they would stay focused on the reader if we did it as a whole class. Possibly breaking them up into groups and allowing them to chose a reading style would make it more interesting for them.
I too, liked how each group was able to decide what technique(s) they wanted to use. This gave each group the opportunity to choose which (they thought) would be best for the people of the group and for the book itself. You talked about how you thought choral reading would be good for younger students because it would help teach them the ideas of how people read. I think it would be interesting to have a group of older students and another group of younger students both read the same book (as choral reading) and look for the differences in how they read the book.
All great points. What we didn't talk about in class (and REALLY should have) is that we could look at all of those things because you all had the schema to jump in with all of them. With kids, you would have a teaching point- like maybe JUST working on rhythm. As far as teaching about the elements before or after giving them books to read from, that depends. If it is a familiar book, there isn't much need to work on it in advance. If you think it is close enough to their comprehension and decoding level, ditto. If the book is on their instructional level, you will need to scaffold more heavily. If it is in the frustration level for the WHOLE group, its a bad choice. If the kids are at widely different levels, you'll want to introduce it in advance so that everyone will be able to participate, or you want to give them time to partner read one or several times before they do the choral reading.
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