Choral Reading (January 28, 2008)

In planning and performing our own choral reading, our group chose to read the book Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. As a group we decided to do a cumulative reading in which one person read a page and then another person joined the first person on the next page and so on. After everyone was reading at once on a page, the next page the last person to join in stopped reading on so on until the only person reading was the one who began. We really did not have a tempo or rhythm to what we were doing. The activity required us to emphasize when we came to Chicka Chicka Boom Boom because it had had exclamation point following it. That is an example of speaking conventions. Another example of this is the use of pace in speaking because as each person joined on everyone had to make sure they were reading together because if we were not then no one would understand anything we were saying. When it comes to speaking discourse we had to plan and deliver an informal presentation to the class in which we demonstrated cumulative reading to the class. When we were listening to other presentations we had to listen to a variety of peer presentations and analyze them to what we thought they were doing such as were they doing echo reading or small group reading? This is an an example of listening and viewing conventions. When it came to listening and viewing response we had to analyze oral interpretations of the literature and the effect of the interpretations of the listener we had to listen to other groups read their books and then we had to decide on what they did and how others could figure out what we were doing. I think that Almasi's idea of discussion played a role in which I was supported in our community because we had to figure out what we were doing and there were no straight forward answers. Something that Goldenberg talked about was instructional conversation and I believed that helped us as a group to think about what we were going to do and how we would do it. We also decided to have one person personally do Chicka Chicka Boom Boom a certain way to make it more fun and interesting. I really wanted our group to work together and agree upon everything we were doing. To do this we had to have discussions about how we would do everything. I think we worked well together and accomplished what we wanted to. I think as a teacher you need to present many options for lessons because not all students are comfortable with everything. Not only did we have small group discussions but large groups too. Having the large classroom discussion, everyone gets the opportunity to share their ideas and thoughts. Something I will have to pay attention to in my language arts lesson is to make sure there is enough time for every group to do what they need to do. I felt that we had time, but not enough to fully engage in discussion. Also, I will make sure that there are options to the assignment because like I said before, not everyone is comfortable with reading in front of the class, but they may be comfortable in front of a small group. I feel like this is a good lesson to have discussion with because it is interesting to hear why each group decided to do their choral readings the way they did. With that said I would like to do a lesson similiar to ith in which it can be done all different ways to see every student's personality and ideas come out.