Hi everyone,

We hope everyone had a great holiday. After working with year one this term these are our insights into what makes a good shared book. Children need to be motivated by the book during reading by encouraging their particpation in the shared reading experience. This means using different modes to help motivate children e.g. singing, visual supports, tone of voice etc. The books that we chose in our group worked well and related well to the children. It was important to build children’s prior knowledge before reading the book to allow them to succeed and have a chance to share their own experiences or hear other children’s experiences so they can begin to understand more about what they will see in the book. This was very beneficial for the children and children enjoyed sharing their experiences. During reading children enjoyed answering a range of questions, learning about new print concepts, reading parts of the book, looking at the pictures and words to help understand the story and relate to characters feelings. After reading it was also good to then relate what the children had learnt from the book back to their own experiences and how this may have changed. We also found most success when activities had an element of oral language in particular story retells, liquid pictures, think pair share and barrier games. This allowed children to talk amongst themselves and listen to others. It was important to model these to children prior to children completing the activity as a lot of our children did not know what to do or had forgotten how to do them. Another element that appeared to be beneficial in the shared reading experience was choosing texts that had repetition throughout. There were lots of other things but these were the main points that appeared to work in our groups.

Amanda and Angela