Nearly 5 years ago I wrote a blog post called “Shared Reading: Focus on Interaction“. Shared reading is when we read a book interactively with someone else – and the focus during the book reading is on that interaction.
As you are aware, there are a lot of electronic resources being shared at the moment, supporting everyone who is in Quarantine School. Some of my favourite resources are videos where people have demonstrated great shared reading practice.
Great shared reading includes:
Reading the book
Using attention getters to bring the student’s attention to the text
Following up this by asking or inviting the student to participate in an interaction about the book
Responding to the invitation to participate – either the student responding or the adult modelling how to respond
This interaction is just as important as the book reading – and is where we should prioritise the use of AAC.
The Grove has let us know that they will be publishing videos of shared reading regularly, starting in about three weeks. I look forward to that!
The next great example I saw was from Red Hill Special School – also on their Facebook page.
(Video no longer available)
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There is a lot going on in this combined Early Years shared reading session, but communication with AAC can be messy, chaotic and doesn’t always go as planned! Remember you don’t always have to model long elaborate messages! The first two pages of the PODD book are easily accessible and easy to model messages like “uh oh”, “help please”, “don’t”.
Today the awesome Mary-Louise Bertram published two videos. Like the previous videos, the AAC system being used is PODD. Mary-Louise reads the same book twice – the first time with a focus for early communicators. The second time for expressive communicators who are using two or more words. It’s lovely to see how she differentiates her interaction for these two groups.
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And to finish – I made a video today as well . For this video I used Proloquo2Go so I could model shared reading with a core vocabulary system. And the book I’m reading is “I don’t like farts” which I shared on this blog recently.
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And I hope lots of you in quarantine school are enjoying shared reading together.
Geneva
jane