Attending to Punctuation with Shared Reading

My district is big on balanced literacy and I'm really trying to "up"  my shared reading game!  

First I googled shared reading to get some basic background info that would help me better implement it.  I searched Wikipedia, EduPlace, ReadWriteThink, and Reading Rockets.   I was also lucky enough to attend a training offered by my district which shared tips and gave us time to plan as a grade level with teachers across the district.

Here's how shared reading works in my classroom:
On Monday, we focus on comprehension including vocabulary, big ideas, and author's purpose.  On Tuesday, we focus on phonics.  On Wednesday, we focus on fluency (phrasing and punctuation).  On Thursday, we focus on word work, including high frequency words and grammar.  On Friday, we illustrate, perform, or respond to the text.

This week, I used a President's Day poem:

 

We went through reading it multiple times and my kiddos really enjoyed it.  Yesterday, we worked on attending to punctuation.  We started by discussing the different punctuation marks in the poem and what they mean for us as readers.  Next, I put sticky notes with different end marks all throughout the poem:

I then had the kiddos read the poem with the added punctuation.  We worked on making sure questions sound like questions from the beginning of the sentence and not just raising our voice at the end.  We also worked on reading with excitement vs. yelling at the top of our lungs.

Overall, my kids had a blast with this activity and the seemed to really understand how to read while attending to punctuation.  We'll continue to practice this skill in guided and independent reading.