Choral Reading

I thought that planning and performing our own choral reading was the most beneficial activity to get us thinking about the purpose of such activities in the classroom. Teachers use choral reading to develop students’ reading fluency by having them explore and experiment with the arrangement of the text. My group collaborated together to read aloud Chicka Chicka Boom Boom to the rest of the class. We decided to do a cumulative reading, where one student begins reading and after each page, another student joins in. Once everyone is reading, we reversed the process and after each page, one less student would read aloud. We continued this until the last person in the circle was reading – the same student who started reading alone.
During the activity, we were asked to focus on our tempo, rhythm, pitch, and juncture. In terms of the Michigan Grade Level Content Expectations, the activity required us to use enunciation and stress to emphasize key ideas and concepts when presenting. As a group, we decided that we wanted to place a lot of emphasis on “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom”, so we chose one student out of the group to stress this phrase by altering the rhythm. Surrounding this phrase, we also altered the juncture of the reading by making sure there was a longer pause both preceding and following the phrase. Since the book had a lot of rhyming words, it would have been ideal if we were able to coordinate our read at a faster pace, which would have required us to use the GLCEs of pace of speaking to enhance meaning and influence interpretation when presenting. I think if our group would have had a little bit more time to practice, we would have been able to perfect our speed and ability to read in unison. We did not focus a lot on pitch when we were reading aloud.
I thought that there was a lot of support within our group during the activity. As Langer mentions in his article, during recitation, the students look to the teacher for support. For this activity, our group engaged in discussion, not recitation, and we were able to look to each other for support. Since there was not as much guidance from the teacher, we were responsible for working together and encouraging each other to share ideas. As a future teacher, I will have to remember that it is okay to challenge students with open-ended activities that force them to talk things out with each other. The great thing about this activity was since there was not a lot of guidance, every group presented something different. One thing I will remember in the future was that in these kinds of group setting, it is easy for one student to sit back and not participate. It is my role as a teacher to make sure that each group is encourage every member to contribute to discussion. This may be accomplished by assigning one student the faciliator to be responsible to prompting the shyer students to share their ideas.