Shared reading is an enjoyable way for children to experience literacy. It offers many opportunities to focus on print and discover how it works to create a meaningful text. Once students become familiar with the print then they can begin to study various features of print such as sight words, letter-sound relationships, directionality, and punctuation. Especially when you do repeated readings of a text it helps the child become more confident in their knowledge of how text works building fluency. We have to remember that in shared instruction the students and teacher work together to study and learn from texts. If I was going to do shared reading with a class, probably elementary class. I'd choose to read books by Eric Carle.
Author Profile: Eric Carle, is acclaimed and beloved as the creator of brilliantly illustrated and innovative designed picture books for very young children. Eric Carle has illustrated more than seventy books, many best sellers, most of which he also wrote, and more than 88 million copies of his books have sold around the world.
Born in Syracuse, New York, in 1929, Eric Carle moved with his parents to Germany when he was six years old; he was educated there, and graduated from the prestigious art school, the Akademie der bildenden Künste, in Stuttgart. But his dream was always to return to America, the land of his happiest childhood memories. So, in 1952, with a fine portfolio in hand and forty dollars in his pocket, he arrived in New York. Soon he found a job as a graphic designer in the promotion department of The New York Times. Later, he was the art director of an advertising agency for many years.
Eric Carle’s art is distinctive and instantly recognizable. His art work is created in collage technique, using hand-painted papers, which he cuts and layers to form bright and cheerful images. Many of his books have an added dimension—die-cut pages, twinkling lights as in The Very Lonely Firefly, even the lifelike sound of a cricket’s song as in The Very Quiet Cricket - giving them a playful quality: a toy that can be read, a book that can be touched. Children also enjoy working in collage and many send him pictures they have made themselves, inspired by his illustrations. He receives hundreds of letters each week from his young admirers.
The themes of his stories are usually drawn from his extensive knowledge and love of nature—an interest shared by most small children. Besides being beautiful and entertaining, his books always offer the child the opportunity to learn something about the world around them. It is his concern for children, for their feelings and their inquisitiveness, for their creativity and their intellectual growth that, in addition to his beautiful artwork, makes the reading of his books such a stimulating and lasting experience.
The website www.eric-carle.com/home.html has some good information on all of his books and other resources about the author himself.
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