Throw in having access to limited resources from your school and it quickly starts to feel too overwhelming. Well, friend, today I want to share some ways we can get creative and still be effective with small group literacy even with minimal resources. Truthfully, you don’t all the bells and whistles and tons of STUFF to run them effectively. You really just need some creativity and effective practices.

Start with a diagnostic assessment.

It may seem silly to say, but it’s worth saying anyway! Before starting any small group reading instruction, it’s important to assess your students’ current abilities – phonological awareness, letter knowledge, high-frequency words, and decoding are a few of the things I start with at the B.O.Y. and how far we go depends on how the assessments are going.

These types of assessments will help you identify students’ strengths and weaknesses, which will inform your teaching strategies. This is super important for all teachers, but especially if you have access to limited resources.

Knowing exactly where your students are and what they need will help you pinpoint the exact resources you will need to help them rather than searching for allll the things!

Choose the right books (decodable, leveled or other).

Once you have identified where your students are, you can select books that are appropriate for their reading abilities. And sometimes, it may be no books at all because you are focusing on other pre-reading skills!

My go to for most Kindergarten students are decodable readers. I share more about why decodable readers are the perfect fit on this blog post and also address my thoughts on leveled texts.

I’ve got tons of affordable decodable reader options here – and what is SUPER NICE about these options are you will have books for all of the readers in your class, can send them home for students to read with families because they’re just printables, and you can use them year after year by just printing new books.

When you’ve got limited resources, the last thing you want to do is have to spend time hunting down decodable readers from all over the place of investing tons of money into pre-printed and bound books that limit the number of books you have or what you can do with them.

Bring in shared reading.

Shared reading is a collaborative approach to reading where the teacher and students read together and discuss the text. Shared reading can be particularly effective with limited resources because you can use text book for the entire group.

I love the flexibility that shared reading offers because you can use a text that you print or project and it doesn’t have to be an entire book! In fact, I love building these strong habits with weekly poems that allow students to build these foundational skills in bite-sized chunks!

Shared reading is the perfect time to focus on building reading fluency, decoding skills, and comprehension.

Incorporate word work during groups and as a center.

Last week I shared some simple and effective ideas for word work in the classroom. Word work activities can help students develop phonics and vocabulary skills, and they can be done using a variety of resources, including word sorts, word walls, and word games.

These are perfect for the word work portion of your small group lesson, but can also be used as a center. We are all about activities that have multiple uses around here!

Again, you don’t need all the bells and whistles here. A lot of these activities can be made by just printing them off, using note cards, or laminating games that you use year after year.

Provide independent reading time.

Independent reading is an important part of any reading program, and it can be particularly beneficial for students in small group settings. I know there are those out there that will say this is a waste of time, but I wholeheartedly disagree.

Students need time to interact with books, turn the pages, look at the pictures, find words they know and learn to enjoy books without the context of a lesson format.

I love to incorporate DEAR (drop everything and read) time as a transition back into the classroom after an active time like recess or PE. It only takes a few minutes and allows the students’ bodies to calm while exploring books. It’s a win-win!

One final cheer for you teacher friend! You don’t need lots of THINGS to run effective literacy instruction or small groups. Do the best with what you have and find inexpensive resources that allow for multiple uses. You are doing amazing things!

And yet, including shared reading as part of your whole group literacy time isn’t quite, well, natural. At least not yet. It still feels like trying to shoehorn another thing in that you know is good for your students but holy moly can’t this all just be EASIER?!?

Yes friend, it can. And it should be! Today I’ll share 5 teaching points for shared reading to make it a fun, simple and second nature addition to your literacy lessons.

Each of these teaching points can easily be customized for any literacy unit, pulled out of your back pocket when you’ve got five minutes to spare before recess, or used as a warm-up before literacy centers. Even better still, they’re perfect for any elementary classroom or reading level — easy to translate for all levels from kinder to fifth!

Let’s dive in:

1. One to One Matching

I don’t know about yours, but my kiddos LOVE their pointers. (I have cute little ones with hands on them that I literally purchased from the dollar store. Money well spent, 100%!) But whether you have “fancy” pointers or just regular pencils, this game is super fun, challenging in all the right ways, and rewarding for readers of all levels.

Whether you’ve got a projector, a white/chalk board, or large poster paper, start by displaying some text to the whole group. (Or if your classroom has tablets, each student can follow along with their own — this activity is super flexible to work with whatever you’ve got!) Ask one student to act as the leader and use their pointer to choose a word where the whole group can see. Then give students a few seconds to read the word silently to themselves (gives slower readers a second to catch up) before reading aloud chorally as a group.

This activity is extremely simple, but oh so important for young readers to gain confidence. By allowing students to focus on one word at a time, and giving a moment to read independently, they can feel confident and supported when reading aloud with the whole group. Plus, even if they get it “wrong”, it’s not a huge mistake that’s obvious to everyone. It’s a tiny blip before moving on to the next word. Also, the student picking the word doesn’t have to worry about “knowing more” in order to lead the group. It’s an easy way to involve all reading levels in different roles.

In fact, I’ve created some super cute winter-themed sight word coloring sheets that pair wonderfully with this activity specifically for Kinder, First, and Second Grades! Play the game as a group, then work individually on the sheets as your first literacy center. Hip hip hooray for seamless integration!

2. Play Detective

This activity can be done with or without additional prep, it works well both ways. It can also be completed whether students have read the text previously or not. Using context clues (or remembering from previous readings of the text in Guided Reading lessons or other Shared Reading activities), students guess what word is missing from a sentence AND practice sounding out the missing word.

It’s awesome if you have a picture to accompany the sentence, like you see below, but for older elementary readers you may have enough context clues in the paragraph without a visual. Either way, students make their guess silently, then adjust their guess as further clues (aka letters) are revealed. Students sound out the word as its revealed, finally seeing the whole word in context.

If you need more details (or just like lots of pictures), I’ve explained this activity in depth in a previous post.

3. I Spy

For this activity I’ve found it best to start with a fresh text that students are not familiar with. Previewing the text without reading aloud, have students locate specific words (most likely sight words you’ve taught) within the text. You can lead the game to begin, saying “I spy a sight word beginning with S,” for example. Students take a few seconds to locate the word on their own, then all respond as a chorus with the word. After a few rounds, students might want to lead a round or two themselves.

This activity is especially helpful for young readers to realize they already know several words on a page even if they’ve never read it before. Talk about building confidence!

4. Focus on Punctuation

Practicing reading punctuation as a group can really help build confidence in less experienced readers. Learning when to pause, raise your inflection and emphasize certain words helps with both reading aloud and public speaking in later elementary and beyond.

Have students read the same sentence with different punctuation and notice how this changes the meaning. How does this sound as a question? Notice how it’s different from a statement. The older your students are, the more involved this activity can become. You can go on a hunt for “question words” like how, why, what, when, where. Or discuss how a story feels different when a character uses an exclamation at the end of their dialogue as opposed to a period. Punctuation is an extremely important storytelling and literacy tool. Integrating it into your literacy lessons can be extremely helpful with student fluency.

5. Cross Check

Cross checking is when a student uses a picture (or part of a picture — revealing different parts of the picture along with revealing letters can be a fun variation on this activity!) and the initial letters of a word to solve for the word. For example, let’s say there’s a picture of a tiger but your kindergarten student is convinced it’s a lion for some reason. They assume they’re reading about a lion but are confronted with a word that starts with a “T”, not an “L”. After sounding out the word fully, they realize the picture must be a tiger since the text supports that reading. Developing the skill of cross-checking helps students use the word AND pictures to read a text, instead of relying too heavily on the pictures and guessing at the story.

I’ve loved getting to share these Shared Reading tips with you this week and I hope you have a blast integrating them into your lessons this winter. Creating a balanced literacy strategy is work, yes, but with practice and the right tools, it can become second nature in no time. Lucky for you, I’ve got all the tools you need to succeed! Grab your set of shared reading poems by clicking here or on the picture below.

When it’s cold outside, there’s nothing that warms me up like teaching kids to love reading! I’m just preparing them to sit by their cozy fires later in life, snuggled up in blankets with a cup of hot cocoa and a wonderful story.

If you’re one of those excellent educators who’s never had a chance to incorporate shared reading into your curriculum, today’s your lucky day. Fortunately for us all, it’s extremely easy to implement. Shared reading is a chance to practice reading skills as a WHOLE GROUP.  It’s a wonderful opportunity for every student to get reading practice at once, in a choral fashion, so that their mistakes don’t stick out, making them feel self conscious. It boosts confidence and stretches students to new levels of accomplishment. This large group time is also perfect for linking to mini-lessons in guided reading, and great for practicing strategies for word solving, re-reading, decoding and monitoring comprehension.

So…what is Shared Reading?

Glad you asked! Shared reading is pretty much exactly what it sounds like — students sharing a reading experience with the same text. This can be done as a whole class activity, in smaller groups, or even in pairs depending on what works best for your schedule and kiddos. The most important elements are that (a) students read aloud and (b) they don’t read alone.

As a whole class activity, everyone should have access to a copy of the same text (you may have partners share a text) and read aloud chorally, like reciting a poem. It’s imperative that students are engaged in reading the text with you, otherwise this would fall under the category of a read aloud.

Shared Reading FAQ:

• How do you choose texts for shared reading? Does it have to be a whole book?

Absolutely does NOT have to be a whole book. In fact, I’ve found poems to be a wonderful way to incorporate shared reading. I’ve just created an awesome package for y’all to use poetry as a form of shared reading complete with projections for read-a-longs and student copies for their poetry notebooks!

I love to use books from Reading A-Z to project for this. If your classroom is equipped with a projector this can be an easy, no fuss way to give everyone access to the text without having to print out copies or do too much prep work ahead of time — y’all know how much I love to cut down your prep-time! I also love to choose books that relate to current themes, units, events, or seasons for relevance. This helps tie in our literacy with other things we’re learning in the classroom.

And let’s not forget about poetry. Having a weekly poem is the PERFECT way to incorporate shared reading. We read through our poem the first day looking for familiar sight words (this day is pretty teacher heavy) and discussing meaning. As the students become more familiar with the poem throughout the week we discuss rhyming words, rhythm, etc.

I also love putting them in a pocket chart so they can become a center where students mix the poem up then rebuild it. After they rebuild the poem they then record the missing words on a student handout. It’s a win-win of incorporating so many skills at once! You can check out my Fall Shared Reading Poems by clicking the image below!

Whatever you choose, it’s important to select texts that are at the instructional level for the majority of your kiddos. This means some kiddos will be stretched a bit and some will be reading down a level or two, but this isn’t a negative at all! You’ll be surprised to see that students at lower instructional levels will rise to the occasion, and those above this level will serve as fantastic peer-models while still gaining fluency practice.

• How do you plan for shared reading?

Instead of reinventing the wheel, I’m going to point you to one of the best strategy guides I’ve found for Shared Reading thus far — ReadWriteThink.org has a study by Jan Miller Burkins that breaks it down brilliantly. She tackles important things to consider before, during and after your shared reading time.

• How often should you incorporate shared reading?

As often as you can! It could even be a daily routine way to bring your class into literacy time. Or a weekly wrap up “Friday Poetry Circle” where everyone also learns to snap like a real poetry session — practicing those fine motor skills all the time too!

• What are the benefits really? I already have so much literacy to plan for!

The benefits are ENORMOUS and you’ll start to notice quickly once this becomes a regular part of your students’ routine. Your kiddos will get more opportunities to practice sight word or high frequency word recognition, as well as fluency practice. Plus, shared reading time allows all students to feel successful as readers.  Shared reading also allows time for students to practice reading texts with appropriate tone and inflection. Reading aloud in a group is a completely different skill than reading silently. It even leads into public speaking skills later in life. Plus, working as a whole group allows you, the teacher to model inflection and tone, then students are given the chance to practice those skills immediately as a group.

Another huge benefit you’ll see right away (within just a couple of weeks) is the effects shared reading has on your guided reading sessions with students. After group experience gaining confidence reading together, students will gain further INDEPENDENT practice with these strategies in smaller groups or on one-on-one mini-lessons with you.

(For more on guided reading and how to get started — head here!)

Incorporating shared reading actually cuts down on your front-loading time teaching guided reading later. It maximizes your time while building student skills — a win/win in my book! Need teaching points for shared reading? Check out 5 of my favorite on this blog post!

However and whenever you decide to incorporate shared reading into your classroom, you’ll be glad you did! I can’t wait to hear your success stories!