Coaching Connection
Lauren, just a little note about our work together
Coaching Session on 5/12/16 and 5/13/16
Thank you so much for the interest and initiative to schedule a session on read alouds! It was great to plan and learn with you about the opportunity to model for students:
tone, intensity, mood and pacing in your read aloud, The Book Itch.
The selection of this book for a read aloud and mentor text is a great one! I love the opportunities that it provides for your class work on memoirs.
Glows...areas of note and highlight!
- You demonstrate such an open and enthusiastic attitude about coaching. I really appreciate you as a thought partner!
- You used your posit-it note reminders as you read in a non-distracting way. I'm not sure the kids even noticed them :)
- You brought intensity to the bolded sections of the text, slowing your voice and lowering the pitch. This really built the intensity.
- In the section about Malcom X's death, you modeled a more serious tone and slower pace. This also built the intensity of this small moment/memory in the author's life.
Ideas...Thoughts to consider in moving your practice to the next level.
Your relaxed/default state is typically a smile (I love this). Sometimes this is how you begin reading too. Does this smile reflect the tone/mood/intensity of this piece?
- If your objective is to model strategically, keep that purpose in the forefront of your mind and demonstrate it overtly.
Consider the engagement of the students. We both noticed that they seemed to lose stamina at one point. What ideas can we generate to counteract this?
- Break the piece into a separate read aloud?
- Move quicker in certain sections?
- Have a few selected pages that we capture the illustrations and display?
A quote just for you regarding Read Aloud...
"As we share the words and pictures, the ideas and the viewpoints, the rhythms and rhymes, the pain and comfort, and the hopes and fears and big issues of life that we encounter together in the pages of a book, we connect through minds and hearts with our children and bond closely in a secret society associated with the books we have shared. The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading."
Fox, M., 2001
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