After discussing print and book awareness, I began thinking of the many things we do as teachers that promote both of these skills. One excellent way to help students develop print and book awareness is to use Big Books in the classroom. These books are a much larger version of the actual book and they are fabulous models for showing a classroom of students text as you do a read aloud. It allows the teacher to introduce print and book features as well as teach reading strategies or focusing on phonics skills with the entire class. This is an effective way to instruct all your students because they can all see the print with ease. These books allow you to read aloud to the students and show where the cover and the back of the book are located. Big Books allow the teacher to show the students where they can find the author and illustrator of a book. These books create an ease for the teacher in modeling the directionality of the print from left to right and top to bottom. Teachers and students can point out specific letters, capital and lowercase letters, chunks within words, punctuation at the end of sentences, and any other print features that can be taught. Teachers can use highlighter tape to focus on a particular skill or feature in the text so that the students can identify it with ease. These books are great for emergent readers because they see the visual model easily in front of them as they are learning and it gives the students the opportunity to read with you as they become aware of different words. Also students enjoy pointing out all the new things that they become aware of in print as you read to them and Big Books give them the opportunity to do this.
I enjoy the use of Big Books in my classroom because they lend themselves wonderfully to direct instruction of print and book awareness skills. I enjoy using the Big Books as a classroom center once I have read them with the class. The students can then revisit the book and reread the story individually or in pairs. My students love to use the pointers and read from the Big Books in the classroom. I often notice them mimic me and pretend to be the teacher as they are modeling the activities that I did with them. I feel that as they copy my lessons, they are retaining the skills that I taught them and enjoying themselves as they read, both of which are my goals as a teacher.
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3 comments:
Nancy,
I agree Big Books are a useful resource to promote concepts of print. Regretfully, I was hesitant to use them this past year. I find them difficult to show and do not have a stand to use with them. It becomes a distraction and interrupts the flow of the story when I fumble with it. However, since looking into the research, I will be sure to use them this coming school year. I will have to figure out a way to use them successfully, they are obviously a great tool and kids are usually excited about them too!
As Vygotsky's theory supports, it's important to use our shared reading time as a social experience. I think by using Big Books, it will help to enhance the reading experience, especially for the audience. I can't help but to think of a group of people circled around a campfire listening to stories. I hope to increase the interaction between my students and I through the use of Big Books.
I was reading an article, Reading to Enrich the Self and Others (2002), and they dicussed the specific benefits of utilizing big books beyond all the students viewing the pictures. With the pictures being so large, so is the print which makes it more visible to more students. The print embedded in a story is critical for students to increase their print knowledge of left to right and up and down. The size of the text also allows the instructor to be intentional with tracking print. When these texts are read aloud students are provided the benefits of read alouds, like building comprehension and word recognition, but the two strategies are integrated. As an instructor I feel that the more bang you can get for your buck the better.
This gives validity to your love of big books and their useful quality in an emergent literacy class. I now wish I had hung on to the big books that I gave away, then again I’m not sure of their usefulness in an intermediate setting.
Ediger, M. (2002). Reading To Enrich the Self and Others. Retrieved from ERIC database.
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