Cohesively Connecting Shared Reading and Centers

Does your reading block flow together cohesively like soft waves in an ocean? Or it is a bunch of jumbled toys tossed in a bin together? Let’s make sure your shared reading and centers connect to cultivate a meaningful learning experience for your students. We want your reading time to be full of different types and modes of learning but also flow together beautifully! A key to that is to connect your shared reading and centers to have a primary focus/ goal.

Reading is like puzzle pieces of skills being put together to help learn to read words and understand them. Centers help students practice and improve the separate pieces. Shared reading is where we model/ practice putting them all together while we read. In shared reading teachers deliver direct instruction modeling the comprehension strategy in context with a mentor text. I want to tell you what I do with my 2nd graders in order to cohesively connect shared reading and centers to enhance their learning.

How to Connect Shared Reading and Centers

• You can focus on one reading strategy. You can model in shared reading, and students practice on their level in guided reading and centers.
• Read the same text in guided reading as shared reading. After that, do a deep dive close read of the text, focusing on skills at each group’s level.
• The books that you use in shared reading and centers like guided reading correlate with each other by character, setting, problem, or theme to lead to comparison discussions.
  • For example, I do many fairy tale units with my 2nd graders. We read the original fairy tale in shared reading. We then read a fractured fairy tale in our guided reading groups or vice versa. In the picture below it shows when we were comparing two versions of the Three Little Pigs.
  • Read more about how I do this with Goldilocks on this blog post. There is a FREEBIE activity on this post that you can use in other centers to further connect your activities! If you have not read Goatilocks with your students yet, you are missing out! There are even more activities to use with Goldilocks here!

• My Focus Frog Center and shared reading connect because they both assess students on the skill of the week.
• If you have a writing center, students can compare and contrast various aspects of the text or write about an overarching theme.

All of the activities that you are doing have a purpose. You picked them to be done the same week for a reason. Taking the extra few minutes to make those connections known to your students will make their learning more cohesive. Connecting shared reading and centers does not need to be a whole big fancy thing. You just have to show students how these skills work together to enhance their reading!

There is so much opportunity for higher level thinking and promoting students critical reading ability. Encouraging these types of connections really enhances their instruction!