Shared Reading: The Little Yellow Chicken by Joy Cowley

The children have a new favorite big book, "The Little Yellow Chicken" by Joy Cowley. It is a story based on the folk tale, "The Little Red Hen." It was introduced on Monday as a shared reading. Shared Reading is an interactive reading experience. We use a big book because it has enlarged text so that all the children can see. During the reading, we involve the children in reading together by pointing to or sliding below each word in the text. This provides children the opportunity to participate and behave like a reader. Shared reading models the reading process and strategies used by good readers such as moving from left to right, word-by-word matching, and using intonation. Shared Reading creates a risk-free environment, allowing children to focus on the enjoyment of the story. Every day a new skill and focus was added. The first day the book was introduced. Questions such as, "Does this book look like fiction or non fiction?"; "Does the chicken look happy?"; and "What other books have we read by Joy Cowley?" The next day, we picked up on fluency and intonation. Sight words were discussed and located in the book. The third reading focused on locating groups of words in the book. Today, we used the letter combination chart which lists vowel combinations (ou, ee, ea, ay) and blends (fr, bl, gr) as a guide to help find these pairs of letters in the words of the book. We used Wikki Stix to circle the letter combinations in the book. We enjoy shared reading of big books because it brings the class together as a reading community and provides us with a shared love of reading...thanks Joy Cowley for the wonderful story!