Shared book experience: Teaching reading using favorite books

Most children would agree that listening to stories is a most enjoyable activity, especially during the early years of schooling. Most teachers do read to their children and they, too, enjoy the experience. By contrast, the instructional reading program, however, does not seem to be characterized by anything like the same level of enjoyment for either children or teacher-it is often a time of boredom or stress and the ritualistic performance of unmotivating activities. Story time and reading time have different purposes, different content, and different rewards. They are so different that one must ask, best embodies literacy? As teachers, we tend to take the differences between these two situations for granted: story time is for pleasure and nothing - least of all word-solving - should be allowed to break the spell; reading time is for learning to read and is a necessarily difficult and painful activity for many children, requiring hard work and application - no spellbinding here. For the work of learning to read we attempt to motivate the children artificially and reward them extrinsically, neglecting the deep satisfactions which spring naturally from a proper engagement with books of high quality. We accept the structured materials provided for instruction