Literacy (Reading)

Components of a Balanced Literacy Program

Read Aloud: The teacher reads a selection aloud to students. These promote a love of reading, stimulate the imagination, and help students develop an ear for the vocabulary and structures of language in print. I have also found that they allow the teacher to introduce new reading strategies, and to model or demonstrate them by thinking aloud, provide models of fluent reading, develop a sense of story/text, develop vocabulary and encourages prediction, all while building a community of readers, with excellent active listening skills.

Guided Reading: The teacher introduces a selection at the student's instructional level. Guided reading;

• Promotes reading strategies and offers students the opportunity to practice their reading skills.
•  Increases comprehension.
• Encourages independent reading.
• Allows the teacher to monitor individual students’ progress.The teacher may need to prompt students to apply their knowledge of reading strategies when difficulties arise, provide further support, or regroup students according to their needs.
• Expands student’s belief in their own ability as a reader and consolidates or extends their understanding of a text.

Shared Reading: The teacher and students read a text together. Shared reading; 

• Allows the teacher to model reading strategies Provides students with essential demonstrations of how reading works and what readers do to construct meaning.
• Demonstrates an awareness of text
• Develops a sense of story or content
• Teaches students strategies for decoding unknown words and for construction meaning from the text.
• Develops fluency, phrasing and reading strategies
•  Increases comprehension
• Allows students to see themselves as readers. They feel comfortable and experience fluency when joining in the reading of familiar texts.
• Provides students with a safe, nonthreatening environment in which to practice new and familiar reading strategies.

Independent Reading: Independent reading;

•  Encourages strategic reading
• Allows students to choose texts that interest them
• Increases comprehension by allowing readers to practice the behaviours of proficient readers,
• Supports writing development,  Extends experiences with a variety of written texts,
• Promotes reading for enjoyment and information
•  Develops fluency by reading just-right books and fosters self-confidence by reading familiar and new texts
• Provides opportunities to use mistakes as learning opportunities