Balanced Literacy
Reading Aloud: Provides an adult model of fluent reading
- Develops a sense of story/text
- Develops vocabulary
- Encourages prediction, questioning, and inference skills
- Builds a community of readers
- Develops active listening
Shared Reading: Teacher and students read a shared text together
- Demonstrates awareness of text
- Develops a sense of story or content
- Promotes reading strategies
- Develops fluency and phrasing
- Increases comprehension
- Encourages politeness and respect
Guided Reading: The teacher introduces a text selection at a student's instructional level and provides small group instruction with students who have similar learning needs
- Promotes reading strategies
- Increases comprehension
- Encourages independent reading
- Expands belief in own ability
Independent Reading: Students have extended time for independently reading texts at their appropriate level as well as exploring high-interest texts that align with their passions
- Encourages strategic reading
- Increases comprehension
- Supports writing development
- Extends experiences with a variety of written texts
- Promotes reading for enjoyment and information
- Develops fluency
- Fosters self-confidence by reading familiar and new texts
- Provides opportunities to use mistakes as learning opportunities
Modeled/Shared Writing: Teacher and students collaborate to write text; the teacher acts as the scribe while everyone in the class contributes ideas
- Develops concepts of print
- Develops writing strategies
- Supports reading development
- Provides a model for a variety of writing styles
- Models the connection among and between sounds, letters, and words
- Models correct writing conventions
- Produces text that students can read independently
- Necessitates communicating in a clear and specific manner
Interactive Writing: Teacher and students compose a text together using a "shared pen" technique in which students do some of the writing
- Provides opportunities to plan and construct texts
- Increases spelling knowledge
- Produces written language resources in the classroom
- Creates opportunities to apply what has been learned
Independent Writing: Students have extended time to write independently across different genres. This time also allows the teacher opportunities to confer one-on-one with students to provide feedback and coaching to help students move their writing forward and improve learning.
- Strengthens text sequence
- Develops an understanding of multiple uses of writing
- Supports reading development
- Develops writing strategies
- Develops active independence