Juli Kendall's Weekly
Writing Workshop Journal

A MiddleWeb Listserv Project

Members of the MiddleWeb Discussion List and other interested teachers are joining together to explore the Writing Workshop and other ideas about supporting young adolescent writers and readers. Juli Kendall, a reading-writing teacher/coach in Long Beach, California, is helping moderate the discussion. Last year, Juli kept a weekly journal from her Reading Workshop.

This year, Juli is continuing her journals, but this time she's focusing on her Writing Workshop. Find out more about our project at our Reading/Writing Workshop homepage. You'll find Juli's background article here. Links to many of the tools created by Juli and her colleagues are embedded in these journals. Most often, when you click on them, a PDF file will begin to download. You'll find a list of the downloads here.

If you'd like to join the daily discussion that parallels Juli's Journals, find out how here.

Writing Workshop
Week #22:

Shared Reading in Writing Workshop


Elisa wrote to the MiddleWeb Reading/Writing Workshop discussion:
I have a question for you. When you say you use Shared Reading instead of just reading aloud, what do you mean? What does it look like to do shared reading with middle school kids? Can you just give a brief description of how you do it with your students? Also, how does this cut down on reading aloud, besides the fact that there is only so much time in a day??
The best Shared Reading is not unison reading. It's not following along with the book. Or having the teacher read at the front of the class. Instead, it's using the voice support of fluent reading to provide levels of scaffolding to meet the needs of all readers in a classroom.

For the last few months, we have been using Shared Reading as a part of our immersion into a genre during a unit of study in Writing Workshop. It's as simple as this: gather five kids into a small group, hand out the text, start reading.

Because of Elisa's questions, I've gone back to the beginning to rethink using Shared Reading as a part of Writing Workshop. That's not because it doesn't work, but because it works so well.

Here's my original reply to her email questions:
I do lots of my instruction during Writing Workshop with small group mini lessons based around a piece of text. I make sure I have enough copies of the text for everyone in the group to have their own. If it's not something that they can write on, I give the kids plenty of post-it notes so they can annotate their copies. I use these texts during the immersion phases of our units of study and then we refer back to them during our genre-study writing. This way, as we read the text, everyone is "on the same page."

I use this instead of me just reading aloud the texts to my kids. It works much better for them to have a copy of their own to annotate.

I think that typing out sections of a text and giving kids their own copies to mark up and annotate while you read them together really keeps my kids more involved in the learning, and they also provide clear examples of the kind of writing we are doing.

My middle school kids all loved shared reading, once they got the idea that it was an active, not a passive, activity. We use the same pieces of text repeatedly in our writing workshop minilessons, first for the immersion and then for the writing.

Here's what Janet Allen says about Reading Aloud on page 4 of "On the Same Page":

"Rather, adding the approach of shared reading as instructional time gives read-aloud its rightful place as a time to experience the rich language, engaging stories, intriguing information, and poetic rhythms that are firmly embedded in most readers' memories without overwhelming emerging readers with too many instructional lessons."
Searching for a way to better explain the concept, I gathered some characteristics of Shared Reading from Janet Allen's book, On the Same Page, Shared Reading Beyond the Primary Grades. (pages 3-6) Taken together they give a comprehensive picture of what Shared Reading means for students.

Characteristics of Shared Reading:
-- Uses the voice support of fluent reading

-- Offers a range of support for emerging readers

-- Avoids overwhelming emerging readers with too many instructional lessons
-- Encourages students to follow the text

-- Has teachers control readers familiarity with the text

-- Includes approaches such as unison reading, oral cloze, enlarged texts, whole-group readings, repeated readings, books on tape, etc.

-- Supports students as they move beyond the range of independent reading

-- Gives developing readers the opportunity to understand how a reader approaches a challenging text

-- Provides levels of support to meet the needs of all learners in a classroom

I found Janet's advice about Shared Reading and writing in Chapter 6, "Writing Roads: Shared Reading as the Foundation for Integrated Language Arts."
"It has been my experience that well-chosen shared reading texts can offer teachers and students a foundation for integrating the language arts: reading, writing, listening, speaking, thinking, and viewing. In this way, students experience all the language arts as effective communication rather than as isolated activities, methods for covering content, or rules. Shared reading can offer students a mirror in which they can see themselves as readers, writers, and critical thinkers. Our job becomes one of choosing the right mirror and holding the mirror still long enough for students to get an image. With shared reading offering students the opportunity to read a text multiple times, they can return to familiar texts when they encounter various challenges of the language arts. (pages 118-119)
Based on my kids' success with Shared Reading in Reading Workshop, I've extended the voice support aspect to Writing Workshop. Using Shared Reading as a strategy for immersing students in text during our Units of Study has proved to be effective. It scaffolds the reading for our kids.

Example of Shared Reading

We're using Shared Reading in our current unit of study of realistic fiction. Here's an example: "Spaghetti" from Every Living Thing by Cynthia Rylant

Step 1: What we know about realistic fiction

Since this is the first day of our unit of study about realistic fiction, we quickly make a list of everything we know about the genre.
What We Know About Realistic Fiction:
-- The animals don't talk.
-- It's real but it's fake.
-- It's something that is kind of true.
-- It never happened.
-- It could happen but
-- It has a problem and a solution.
Step 2: Predicting

Before reading, we work together to predict what the story will be about. The kids use the illustration of a kitten and the title, "Spaghetti," for ideas.
"I think it will be about how good spaghetti is too eat."
"I predict it will be about a kitty who eats too much spaghetti."
"I predict that spaghetti will get all over the cat."
Step 3: Shared Reading

Every student has a copy of the book, Every Living Thing, and as I read the story aloud, they follow along. Some read silently and others mouth the words quietly. There are few interruptions. I ask them to notice the characters, the setting, the plot and the descriptions as we are reading.

Step 4: What do you notice about this story?

The characters are easy for the kids to understand. Making a list of qualities for each of them gives us a clear picture of Gabriel and Spaghetti.
Gabriel, the boy
-- Thinks about a lot of things
-- Takes it seriously
-- Wants to live outside
-- He changes at the end
-- Has an artistic imagination

Spaghetti, the kitten
-- Crying outside
-- In the street
-- Smells like warm pasta
-- Cries like the wind
The setting is more challenging. In order to help the kids understand where the story takes place, I reread the first two sentences. The words "evening" and "stoop" need to be clarified.
It was evening, and people sat outside, talking quietly among themselves. On the stoop of a tall building of crumbling bricks and rotting wood sat a boy. (p. 31)
After reading the story, our discussion focuses on the story's problem and the resolution. Kids don't know what the phrase "he wished for some company" means, so they get confused. Once they figure out that Gabriel is lonely, they understand the resolution:
So he stood up, with Spaghetti under his chin, and went inside to show his kitten where they would live together. (p. 33)
We'll reread the short story, "Spaghetti," several more times while we spend two weeks immersing ourselves in realistic fiction for our unit of study. Then it's on to the writing.

On that day, Shared Reading and Writing Workshop will come together, and sitting there, ready to begin writing, will be the kids. And, really, just reading and writing is what it's all about.


A List of Reading Suggestions for Realistic Fiction

Short Story Collections

145th Street: Short Stories by Walter Dean Myers
America Street, A Multicultural Anthology of Stories edited by Anne Mazer
Baseball in April by Gary Soto
Every Living Thing by Cynthia Rylant
On the Fringe edited by Donald Gallo (7th grade and up)
A Summer Life by Gary Soto
Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories by Sandra Cisneros

Short Stories and Excerpts From Longer Texts

"The All American Slurp" by Lensey Namioka
"The Bike" by Gary Soto from A Summer Life
"Chinatown" by Lawrence Yep
"Eleven" by Sandra Cisneros from Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories
"The Jacket" by Gary Soto (maybe excerpted from a longer story)
"The Marble Champ" by Gary Soto from Baseball in April
"Mukasa" from Mukasa by John Nagenda
"Searching for Candlestick Park" by Peg Kehret
"Spaghetti" by Cynthia Rylant from Every Living Thing
"Thank you, Mam" by Langston Hughes.

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