A Shared Reading lesson with self-drawn pictures and sequencing, in the Foundation Phase.

This post is being written as Deb Avery conducts a Grade 1 Shared reading lesson at Victoria Primary in Grahamstown. The Grade 1 girls are all sitting on the mat at the front of the classroom. A group of Foundation phase teachers sit on the mat at the back of the classroom along the wall observing the lesson. The aim of the lesson is to read a story from a Big Book with understanding, and reconstruct the text in joint rewriting.

The Preparing for Reading stage
Deb gets to know the class and relates the story to the context of the girls. The girls want to tell her lots of stories. Deb summarises the story. She has drawn pictures because the story has no pictures. This is to show that it if one has a good story but no pictures, one can create one's own images even if you can't really draw! As she summarises the story and shows the pictures she develops the vocabulary of the learners. This section ends with Deb reading the story to the girls. The girls love to recite the repetitive parts.

Preparing for the Reading stage

Deb reads the story

Sentence making
Deb now reads the story again, and as she finishes a page she hands the words and pictures to a child. After she has done this, she reads the story again and the learners recognise whether they are holding that part of the story. The girls sequence the story correctly.

Handing out a piece of story, after reading it

All the girls with their piece of story, in sequence

Deb retells the story again pointing to each text. Deb then questions the learners for their comprehension of the text. After that, the girls give back the story pictures and words, and Deb hands out the sentence strips.

Handing out the sentence strips

The learners work in groups. As Deb calls out questions they cut out the words from the sentence strips, taking it in turns. Deb points out language along the way. She affirms all the way when someone answers the questions correctly.

The girls read the sentence strips together

They take turns cutting out the words, as directed by Deb's questioning,

Spelling stage
Deb works with selected words and breaks them into syllables.

Breaking selected words into letter patterns

Vocabulary building

Joint rewriting
Following the patterns of the text the learners reconstruct the story with different characters and settings. Deb lets them vote for different aspects of the story. She then writes the reconstructed story on the board and the learners read the new story. 

Independent writing
We didn't have time to complete the next stage which is Independent writing. In this stage, the learners go a step further and write their own story or sentence, and they draw a picture. 

This was a great lesson. It was long yet the learners remained engaged all the way through.