Value of Shared Reading

Working with children is a fulfilling job especially for people who love being surrounded by young people. However, teachers who handle young children are highly responsible for the development of the child. A teacher is not paid to have fun with kids. He needs to ask questions about the best way for young people to learn and the most appropriate techniques to employ to guide the kids as they grow. Are the methods employed in teaching effective? If not, then what changes must be made to make teaching more effective? How should children be taught how to read and write?To create an effective atmosphere for learning, a teacher must be an effective mentor to children.

He should recognize the role of literature in class, which goes together with how children learn how to read and write. To appreciate literature at a young age, teachers must guide children on sharing cultural heritage, historical heritage, experiences and pleasures which they should all share with each other. With that, literature is starting to be understood. Shared Reading: Definition and its Value Shared reading refers to an interaction shared between two people while reading a book.In this case, the interaction happens in a home, an outpatient clinic or a classroom, between a child and an adult, or several adults and children. Shared reading is also sometimes referred to as book sharing, reading aloud or story book reading.

What an adult and a child shared together when reading are the story, pictures and texts found in a book (Parkes, 2000, p. 1). While shared reading may seem trivial because it seems to cover only an activity on looking at pictures in a book, truth is, the child learns new sounds, concepts, ideas, sights and words which an adult helps to uncover.These aspects of what a book can offer are foreign to a child.

These are something a child does not normally encounter in school, community and home. A good example would be a shared reading on the fairy tale Cinderella, where a young girl will have her first idea on the concept of a fairy godmother or the sounds of a horde of horses in the middle of the night. “It can be her first time to learn about dwarfs as she reads Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with her teacher” (Parkes, 2000, p. 2).

Another good example would be the book which Rod Campbell wrote entitled Dear Zoo, which introduces a child to new concepts like turtles, camels, zebras and snakes – animals which he or she does not encounter everyday, especially at this young age. In this book, a child also learns how a turtle, a camel, a zebra or a snake sounds like. A child starts to be introduced to new linguistic concepts which are highly significant as he or she grows up. A child also learns a wide variety of feelings and values like beauty, evil, fury and adjectives like lazy, ugly, fierce or grumpy. A child learns the sound of a choo-choo train, the beep beep of a cab or the ding dong of a bell.

All these can be taught to a child in just a few pages of a book” (Parkes, 2000, p. 2). This is where the value of shared reading comes in. In just a matter of, say, 50 words, a child is already exposed the many things which he needs to develop as he grows.

A child is introduced to these ideas and information because an adult is helping him be exposed to these. Otherwise, he would not realize what the “choo-choo” of a train is all about.He may know what a camel looks like, but he wouldn’t know what it is called. He would “feel lazy at time, but he wouldn’t know the proper way to describe the feeling” (Parkes, 2000, p.

2). While a child also learns to explore vocabulary concepts through shared reading, there are a lot more that he can get from it. The value of shared reading is not limited to just learning new sounds, new feelings, new concepts and new words. Shared reading also provides the child new pieces of information about his own culture.In this case, a child learns how pragmatic rules are set and applied in his culture. He learns how these rules guide language use.

He learns how a story is introduced to a reader, how introduction is written, how the body goes, and how smooth the transition should be from the beginning to the end of the story. He learns the organization of texts and prints on the book. He learns the proper illustration for a particular subject matter, where it is placed on the page and why it is printed in that area.Through shared reading, “a child is exposed to how books work (Allen, 2002, p.

). ” As a child reads a book with an adult, he sees the same letters every moment he opens a book. This way, he starts to discover and understand the connection between these letters, and how these letters, when combined, form a word. He discovers that a string of letters can form one meaningful thought. Of course, between these shared reading sessions, this activity teaches a child to interact with people around him, starting from his interaction with his teacher or mother or whoever he shares a book with.He learns the role of adults in his life, along with mastering how he can make the relationship better.

In short, through shared reading, “a child learns how to interact with society. It is within this relationship that a child starts to learn to give meaning to literacy and language” (Allen, 2002, p. 7). It must then be understood that shared reading is not at all about teaching a child how to read. Learning to read is what comes next after child learns how to recognize what he will see in a book.

Shared reading is then a preparation for a child to learn how to read.Through shared reading, “a child starts to build his foundation for reading” (Allen, 2002, p. 8). To make the picture clearer, learning to read can be compared to learning about music. Before a child learns how to read notes for the piano or play chords on a guitar, he first has to learn how a piano or a guitar sounds like.

He has to be familiar with melody, harmony and pitch before he learns other technical information and explicit instructions regarding music. Children Should Write the Way They Know How With shared reading comes independent writing, too.A child cannot learn how to read and learn how to start his foundation for reading without building his foundation for writing. Reading and writing always go together. If a child knows how to read, he also learns how to write.

If he learns how to write, then he surely knows how to read. How he performs on one skill depends on how he performs on another (Yoo, 1997, p. 1). Teachers set the foundation for a child to learn how to properly write words.

A teacher lets a child write the alphabet until he learns how to write his own name.A child is allowed to write words according to his own knowledge of sounds and letters. He can write his own stories, ideas and questions. He learns to record his experience or a sound he just heard according to how he thinks is the right way. He may even “use charts and illustrations without knowing that these are called as such” (Yoo, 1997, p.

1). Parents allow their children to talk freely as they grow, even without understandable and meaningful words. This way, the child learns his communication skills even without the technicalities of communication.The same is true with writing. Letting a child talk freely in his own way of communicating gives the same benefits to a child who is allowed to write freely even with all the words hardly understood and constantly misspelled.

Teachers allow a child to write in a way he knows how because this way, a teacher determines if a child actually grasps the sound of a word properly. For example, a child always hears the word “you. ” He may write this as “u” because it is how it sounds. He may spell the word “love” as “luv.

”A teacher then evaluates how a child is coping with writing and this is where the role of a teacher comes in. A teacher teaches a child the proper spelling of “u” and “luv” and the child, on the other hand, starts to incorporate this new knowledge into his brain. He starts to adapt to the conventional way of writing words. He starts to recognize the standards for words. The main purpose of allowing a child to write on his own approximation is to see if already has earned the foundation of writing, or spelling for that matter, before actually learns how to properly spell and write words.