Guided Reading- From one Teacher to Another: Guided Reading in an Early Year’s Classroom!

I’ve had a number of teachers make contact looking for support and my advice is as follows:

1.      Read my blog!

2.      Visit other grades and watch a number of Guided Reading sessions and then most IMPORTANTLY ask to be coached! You need to ‘do’ to grow, not just watch someone else model, however, that’s a great place to start! I’ve coached others and been coached myself!

3.      Visit Utube and watch Guided Reading videos. There are many terrific videos made by real teachers for teachers.

Background – My Program

There are a lot of different views about when students should start Guided Reading or ‘what’ can be called Guided Reading. I am a purest, and by this I mean I follow the Guided Reading Model as outlined in the Early Year’s program, but feel free to call what you do, what you want!

As stated in my previous blogs, I do not start Guided Reading with students until they can read a RR Level 3 book at an instructional level. This does not mean that my students don’t read in groups, they do, I just call it Shared Reading or a ‘Round Robin’.

It’s my belief that children need to know a lot about ‘how books work’ before tackling Guided Reading. Developing oral language via Language Experience is where I start.

Children need to have the basic ‘Concept’s of Print‘ in place and I teach this via Shared Big Books, Round Robin and shared small book reading. We’re in training for Guided Reading from the beginning of the year. Children are taught at their ‘point of need’, so groupings are flexible and change according to student needs.

To stop children comparing themselves against others, I don’t call my groups colours or names. My groups are: My Group (teaching group on day), This Group, That Group, The Other Group & Your Group. Sounds confusing, however, it works and I’m into ‘things’ that work. Each group sign has a little icon and that stops me from being confused! It’s also really important that young children and parents value the learning process more than the reading level.

When bringing a group of children to the floor I like to use their names as it’s more ‘about them’. Grouping children according to assessment is another post itself, making groups seems easy, but if you want to maximise student learning and accelerate reading development its quite complex and requires detailed assessment. It’s simply not putting children reading around the same RR level together. (Another post coming soon) However, I will mention the following crucial assessment tip.

Important Strategy for forming Groups:

It is important that you keep completing Running Records on students until you find their first Hard level, and then drop back to their last Instructional level. This is their level for Guided Reading. There is often confusion among teachers about, what a child’s actual Running Record instructional level is? If this doesn’t make sense I’ll explain all in another post.

 Guided reading- Explained – A Teacher’s Explanation!

‘The goal of guided reading is for students to use (reading) strategies independently on their way to becoming fluent, skilled readers.

The steps for a guided reading lesson are:

Before reading: Set the purpose for reading, introduce vocabulary, make predictions, talk about the strategies good readers use.

During reading: Guide students as they read, provide wait time, give prompts or clues as needed by individual students, such as “Try that again. Does that make sense? Look at how the word begins.”

After reading: Strengthen comprehension skills and provide praise for strategies used by students during the reading.’

Extract:

Guided Reading: Good First Teaching for All Children by Irene C. Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. Heinemann Publishers, 1996

Guided reading
‘The teacher guides students as they read, talk and think their way through a text. The teacher selects a text at the students’ instructional level, prepares the group for reading by establishing prior knowledge of the topic or text types, and briefly introduces the text then guides the students through it. Periods of independent reading are followed by discussion and teaching. Central to a guided reading session are the interactions between the group members.

 

Steps:

●The teacher becomes familiar with the text prior to taking a guided reading session.

●Select an appropriate text: unseen texts are generally used.

●Students require an individual copy of the text. Texts should be selected at the students’ instructional level, i.e. one that the students cannot yet read independently.

●The teacher identifies the supports and challenges in the text and selects teaching focuses based on the students’ learning needs.

●The teacher leads a discussion on the topic of the text and students’ related experiences.

●The teacher asks questions and makes comments to encourage students to read closely.

●Students briefly discuss the title and summarise the plot.

The teacher provides:

●meaning support by talking through the content or plot

●structure support by asking questions that model the language structures of the text

●visual support by discussing any new or unusual words that appear in the text

The teacher makes explicit the purpose and teaching focus of this reading, e.g. to examine a certain text type or to analyse a character.’

Extract:Sofweb – Teaching strategies to enact apprenticeship in classrooms

 

NB: Why I use PM Levelled Books for Beginning ? (Extract from previous post- My top 10 Resources) We are re-housing a number of PM 1-6 books at present into bags.

Why I Like PM Books for Beginning Readers!

I have no desire to advertise, but sometimes it may benefit others if I do talk about a particular publication that supports and scaffolds student learning. For student’s reading from RR Levels 1-6, I prefer to use PM books. Why do I like PM’s for beginning readers? PM readers introduce new vocabulary slowly, high frequency words are embedded into each text and are built upon at each level. The pictures support the text and the levels themselves are accurate. The topics are child centred.

 

Photo- PM Level 5 Text –  Standard First Year of School (minimum)

Assessment- Victorian Government Reading Benchmarks.

At the end of the year all Prep students are benchmarked. The minimum standard for Victorian school children is RR Level 5. The photo shows a Level 5 PM text. The aim is for the student to read this level text fluently. As stated this is the minimum and many students achieve higher levels.  The minimum benchmark for Year 1 (2^nd year of school) is Level 15 and Level 20 for year 2(3^rdyear of school). All Prep, Year 1 and Year 2 students are benchmarked.  (Data Collection and Evaluation in Victorian Schools Explained) The Video below has some great ideas.