Shared Reading Shout-Outs!

Happy Saturday!
Today I'm publicly revealing a huge teaching problem I have...
I am a full-fledged Shared Reading hoarder. For real.
The worst part about it...we don't even teach Shared Reading in our literacy model! That doesn't stop me though...I believe the value is SO incredibly rich. 
 At my school, we don't teach "themes" or "holidays," so I have to do what I think is right and also make sure I'm maximizing my students' academic time. This requires multi-tasking... something we as teachers can definitely do!
I do include Shared Reading in my Guided Reading "Power Hour" block and I LOVE it! We start together at the carpet using the sentence chart and our pointer :)

Oh no! I didn't have a picture on my camera phone :( This picture is from last summer when I was still moving into my intervention space. Our space now looks much messier more active now. Check out the black sentence pocket chart ♥
Last year I used DeeDee Will's Shared Reading Bundle:

It's. The. BOMB!
Even better, she has an accompaniment set for my students to work on when we start our small group rotations:

Can't say enough about the entire collection. I also purchased her Nursery Rhymes Bundle, extension set, and downloaded her free Campfire set. If you haven't been hoarding materials like I have, her bundle is an amazing way to go.
THEN, I discovered Jane Loretz. Holy moly, she's awesome!  I purchased her Halloween set and put it to use immediately last fall. I then kept her bundle on my wishlist f-o-r-e-v-e-r. I had already checked out each seasonal set and inserted the titles into my planner. I'm so happy to report I "made it official" and finally purchased the bundle this morning! Woohoo!

There's one more resource you have to check out...it's from one of my new FAVES: Whimsy Workshop Teaching. You already know her by her fabulous clipart, but she also makes beautiful integrated units. I started with this one:

Please note: this packet is not actually shared reading, however there was one poem included in the product. My students loved it, so I quickly snapped up this bundle:

Her accompaniment activities are TOP-NOTCH! Creative, rigorous, and FUN for my students. The kind of materials I would have loved to have created (and I have several half-completed sets where I tried), but these are literally just perfect and cannot be improved in any way.
So what does this all mean? I now have 72 adorable Shared Reading themes. Actually 73 because I created one for a theme that was understandably missing.
73. Which is pretty incredible considering I need maybe 34. My next step is organizing all of these and then having the fun of CHOOSING the "just right" for my students. I don't mind having double the inventory...our students are different every year, right? YES!
In my last post, I shared some of my organizational ideas.  My new teaching motto is leaning towards: Do More with Less. Meaning I want to fine-tune my teaching to really focus in on what my students "absolutely need to know" versus trying to do everything (and spreading it all too thin).
This led me to my teaching "buckets" - what I, as a special educator, really "do" throughout the teaching day. This is what it looks like:

Does any of it surprise you? My students are involved in more learning throughout the day...writing (Lucy Calkins model), enrichments, Science, Spanish. But these are the buckets that cover my students' specific areas of concern. Guided Reading is "on my own" in my intervention room and the rest of the day is inclusion (general education setting). 

The last box is for the resources that meet my students' specific needs. This year, that would be "behavior," but in previous years it might lean heavily on handwriting, Reading Mastery, etc. It changes from year to year and is whatever my students need!

As I'm looking at my resources, my store products, my wishlists...I'm asking myself: "Does this fit in with what I actually do?" Stay tuned for some major refinements! I plan on blogging for each little "sub-bucket" to share some best practices. 

Today's bucket is obviously Shared Reading...

How I Sneak Shared Reading In
We group our Guided Reading by levels and I work with the bottom quartile.  It can change every year, but we usually are starting around Guided Reading A and finishing around D-F (still below grade-level for 1st, but blasting our growth goals!).
We meet for approximately 50 minutes, four days per week (Monday-Thursday). 

One of my all-time favorite strategies that provides a lot of bang-for-your-buck (first grade style) is "Spy & Why." My students get to use the pointer and "spy" something from the Shared Reading poem and then they must tell us "why" - what is the word and what do you notice? 

I usually start the first Spy & Why and often choose a word that connects with another curricular area (vocabulary, content/theme, phonics skill). I designate the next two days for sight words and phonics, but I follow the child and will accept any "spy & why" words!

One last tip I learned from DeeDee's packets: I cut up transparent dividers (I had multi-colors) into word size strips. My students "highlight" a word on the sentence chart by inserting one of these cut-up strips:

Image from The Artful Parent

(you can make stained glass, too!)

Do you teach Shared Reading? Is it part of your literacy block? Do you use Big Books or sentence charts? I'd love to hear your ideas!

Have a super Saturday! Jen