Big Books Learning Circle

 This year I have the privilege of teaching a Year 4/5 class of 49 students in a collaborative space. We soon realised that the low academic performance that we are seeing is a direct result of COVID. Students missed out on the very important foundation part of their education. My colleague and I sat down and brainstormed how we can support our students the best way we can to try and get them up to standard, especially around independent activities. We then started talking about the value of the Big Book. Not reading to...but genuinely using the Big Book for what it is meant to be and decided that our students need this kind of focussed teaching. 

As my colleague never taught junior students, we decided that we will investigate the value of the Big Book by using it in Term 1. Our main focus is to use it to build up students' vocabulary, use of punctuation, sentence structure and language structure. This will also enable us to support students in understanding the connection between reading and writing. And finally, it will support our ELL students to gain confidence in attending to the text, illustrations, diagrams, and photographs while hearing the language used in an authentic context (TKI). 

So, we created a learning circle that will

read up on ways to use the Big Book, plan for it during our daily writing time and set out independent follow-up activities for each day. 

This is what we learned so far just by looking at some of the lesson plans in front of some BIg Books. 

Day 1 - Read with expression

Day 2 - Read again - pay attention to vocab - decoding

Day 3 - Read again - Pay attention to vocab and its meaning (build up word wall)

Day 4 - Read again - Pay attention to punctuation

Day 5 - Students read - Teachers stand back - students do a recount of the story

This is what TKI say on Shared reading: 

Shared reading is an essential component of the literacy programme in years 5 to 8. It allows for a high degree of interaction and is a great way for teachers to help students extend their understanding of themselves as effective text users. During shared reading, teachers and students can participate in collaborative reasoning to solve literacy-related problems.

Through this approach, teachers can deliberately extend their students’:

• understanding of themes and ideas;
• use of reading strategies;
• appreciation of literary devices, such as imagery;
• vocabulary;
• knowledge of the purposes and characteristic features of different text forms.

For more information on Shared Reading (TKI) follow this link. https://literacyonline.tki.org.nz/Literacy-Online/Planning-for-my-students-needs/Effective-Literacy-Practice-Years-5-8/Approaches-to-teaching-reading

If you have experience in using the Big Book in your literacy programme, please feel free to share your thoughts on its value.