- Guided Reading Activities. We have a number of guided reading activities, guided reading questions and resources that you may find useful in your classroom.Which you choose to use really is an individual preference. You will also need to consider the level of your students when thinking about what to focus on in each of the guided reading.
- When I first reviewed myView Literacy, I was overwhelmed with the wealth of amazing resources at my fingertips. Never again would I have to spend countless hours perusing the web for quality materials to engage my students. I had everything I needed and more on Pearson Realize. From the ready-made literacy stations and interactive e-Text, I could tell.
- The theory may be good, but it’s execution in guided reading leaves much to be desired. First, the book leveling schemes that are being used are pretty dubious. I’m not talking about Lexiles or other well-validated readability schemes, but the book leveling schemes for guided reading are pretty shaky.
Guided Reading Boring? Whether we agree or not, the current method for assessing our children’s ability to read and therefore the method to assess a school’s effectiveness at teaching reading is measured.
Guided Reading in THE Classroom: Strategies for Success
Few skills can benefit a child more throughout their life than the ability to read. It is a skill of such singular importance that it plays a role in most aspects of everyday classroom learning.
However, unfortunately for a skill of such importance, it isn’t always possible to find the time for 1:1 reading with every student every day during the busy school schedule. It is this problem that guided reading is designed to address.
What is Guided Reading?
Guided reading is a group method of teaching reading skills that can be used in place of, though usually in addition to, occasional 1:1 reading and discrete phonics instruction.
Generally speaking, guided reading involves teaching groups of children according to their ability levels. The exact number in each group will depend on the number of children in the class, as well as how well they do in a baseline reading assessment.
Usually there are about five groups in the average class, though these groups may be uneven in size and can be updated at various intervals throughout the year according to individual rates of progress as reflected in reading assessments.
In essence, guided reading is all about teaching to the various needs of the levelled groups in the classroom. It endeavors to instruct the students in a range of reading strategies that can be later applied independently to any new book the student encounters.
Understanding Reading Levels
This can vary slightly depending on the region in which you teach but the most commonly used method of guided reading assessment used is the alphabetical system developed by Fountas, and Pinnell in the 1990’s.
The levels range alphabetically from A to Z, with level A representing the lowest level and level Z the highest. This allows the teacher to work closely with each student to help them become better readers by introducing increasingly challenging books while meeting the varying instructional needs of each child in the room.
It would be expected that as a child progresses from kindergarten to the end of year 2 they would progress through all 26 levels.
Without an understanding of a students level guided reading lacks any assessable growth.
Nearly every primary and elementary school will have a copy of a benchmark assessment system similar to what you can see here, so track it down and ensure you are familiar with it particularly if you work in the junior levels.
How is Guided Reading Organized?
To implement guided reading successfully, multiple copies of graded readers will be needed. You will also need to assess each student’s reading abilities to enable you to group them according to their specific ability.
For our elementary-aged (or primary-aged) students, reading should be a daily activity. Given the size of the average class, guided reading is often the main method employed to teach reading.
If there are five guided reading ability groups in the classroom, the teacher can expect to read with each group approximately every other day, for a minimum of twice per week. This is usually done on a rota basis.
While the teacher reads with a group, the other groups can be engaged in other reading activities suitable for their level. These activities may include phonics work, sequencing activities, comprehension tasks, language games etc.
If there is a teaching assistant in the classroom, they can either support the children in completing these supplementary activities, or take the lead in a guided reading session also.
The Guided Reading Area
Implementing guided reading successfully in the classroom requires considerable organisation. To make the most of the allotted time in the classroom it can be very helpful to dedicate a specific area to the practice.
Some things you may wish to place in your guided reading area may include:
● Tables, chairs
● Posters / prompts of various reading strategies
● Listening area for audio versions of books
● Multiple copies of graded readers
● Book boxes
● Computers
● Mini whiteboards and markers
● Pencils, paper, Post-It notes etc
If classroom decoration is an area of interest to you be sure to check out this great article which explores great ways to enhance reading corners.
GUIDED READING ACTIVITIES & STRATEGIES
As we have stated in the introduction, the main aim of guided reading is to instruct the students in the use of reading strategies that will eventually enable them to confidently and competently read any book by themselves.
We can group our strategies into three useful categories:
Prediction - What do you think will happen next?
Clarification& Questioning - Which parts of book did you find difficult? What questions do you have about these?
Summarizing - What is this book about? What happens?
1. Prediction
Prediction encourages students to draw on their own prior learning and experiences to allow them to make educated guesses on what may follow in the story.
Prediction activities are great activities to hone your students’ predictive abilities and comprehension skills, and they can be repeated often. They also have the added advantage of requiring very little preparation by the teacher.
Prior to beginning to read the chosen book, some pre-reading work is necessary to focus the students’ minds on the task at hand.
Typically, this work will begin with an examination of the following elements of the book:
● Title - What is the title of the book? What does the title reveal about the book?
● Blurb - What information does the blurb reveal? What expectations does it create?
● Author - Who is the author? What is the author’s purpose in writing this book?
● Illustrator - Who is the illustrator? What clues do the illustrations give you about this text?
● Cover - What does the cover make you think about? What expectations are created?
● Genre - What type of text is this? Is it fiction or nonfiction? How do you know? What are our expectations of this genre in terms of subject and format?
While prediction begins with the mostly pre-reading activities outlined above, there will be ample opportunities for the student reader to make further predictions throughout the reading of the book too. For example, it is good practice to ask the students, or encourage them to ask themselves, prediction type questions at the end of a paragraph, section, or chapter.
Working on using prediction strategies in guided reading encourages the student to read closely for inferences and other clues that will indicate the journey the text may take. It also encourages the student to pay close attention to the content of the text as they read. This kind of holistic approach to reading improves overall comprehension of a text.
Prediction Graphic Organizer Activity
Provide the students with a T-Chart worksheet entitled ‘My Predictions’. The chart should consist of two columns; one headed My Prediction and the other Why I Think This. Provide a space to record the student’s name and the title of the text at the top of the sheet.
At any point during the reading of the text, you can instruct the students to stop and think about where this story is going. Students can record their predictions on their sheet, as well as the reasons for thinking this.
This activity can serve well as a supplementary reading activity on days when the group is not scheduled to read with the class teacher.
Thousands of teachers have adopted this as a GO-TO RESOURCE for INDEPENDENT and GROUP tasks.
60+ activities requiring students to WRITE in a range of genres and styles based on their text
40+ activities incorporating ARTISTIC and CREATIVE skills about their book.
30+ TECHNOLOGY based activities, including 20 open-ended iPad and web based tasks
25+ GROUP based tasks
20+ tasks requiring RESEARCH, ENQUIRY and EXPLORATION of concepts within a text.
50+ tasks you can use with FILMS, GRAPHIC NOVELS and DIGITAL LITERACIES.
15+ activities involving DRAMA, MUSIC and ROLE PLAYING
15+ GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS that can be applied to any text
2. Clarification and Questioning
In terms of guided reading, clarification refers to first identifying the difficult parts of the text, before making sense of them through a variety of clarification techniques.
These techniques can be as simple as looking up a word in a dictionary. There are other tools available to students, however. Often, when students look up the meaning of a word in a dictionary it helps clarify the meaning of that part of the text in the short term, but sometimes the word’s definition is not retained for the next time the student comes across it.
Sometimes it is better for the student to use other techniques to work out the meaning, such as employing contextual clues.
Clarification and Question Prompts
Drills employing sentence starters are a great way to effectively train our students to clarify and question and to help internalise these strategies. Begin with the clarification prompts to help students identify the areas of the text they are unsure of, before moving to the question prompts to help them begin to work out the meaning and significance within the text.
Clarification Prompts:
● This part is difficult because…
● I didn’t understand when…
● I found it difficult to work out the part where…
● I don’t know what this means where it says...
When the students have identified the vocabulary, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and sections that are giving them trouble, they can then move on to forming questions using the following question prompts:
Question Prompts:
● Who…
● What…
● Where…
● When…
● Why…
● How...
These prompts help students to identify more closely the source of their confusion when reading a text, and to learn to ask for assistance. In the process of receiving an answer to their questions, they begin to broaden their understanding of a range of techniques they can later employ in independent reading to clarify the meaning of a text for themselves.
In the context of guided reading, it can be helpful for students to work together to form the questions to ask their teacher.
Rather than directly answering the questions for the group, however, teachers would do well to encourage the students to work towards finding the answers for themselves, as this not only helps knowledge retention, but improves their reading independence.
3. Summarizing READING
Summarizing is an important skill for students to develop. It helps students to identify the most important parts of a text or story and to learn to ignore irrelevant details and information too. Students who practice summarizing learn to integrate the details and the main ideas of a text in a meaningful way. Summarization is useful for fiction and nonfiction genres alike.
A simple way to encourage your students to summarize a story is to ask them to paraphrase it in their own words. As it will be highly unlikely they will have memorized the entire story word for word, paraphrasing the story will allow you to assess their overall understanding of what they have read.
Annotate and Summarize
To encourage your students to summarize a text, ask them to answer the following four things:
● What are the main ideas in the piece?
● What are the most important details or points made?
● What details or information is irrelevant or unnecessary?
● What are the keywords and phrases in the text?
If they have photocopies of the story, you may wish to have them underline or highlight the information related to the above questions in different colors and then ask them to retell the story in their own words after they have done this. Encourage them to use the keywords and phrases used in the text in their retelling too.
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Get Guiding
To get guided reading started in the classroom requires lots of planning and organisation at the beginning of the year, but this initial investment of time and effort reaps rich rewards for students that is reflected in their rapid progress.
Once clear procedures and routines are established, your students will become more adept at applying the broad range of strategies to a wide range of text types. This will go a long way to producing the confident and capable readers any teacher would be proud of. Now, get guiding!
Content for this page has been written by Shane Mac Donnchaidh. A former principal of an international school and university English lecturer with 15 years teaching and administration experience. Editing and support content has been provided by the literacyideas team.
Planning the SmallGroup Reading Lesson: Teach and Guide
Small GroupInstruction
I just completed a review of 147 reading texts used in our colleges of education to teach teachers how to teach reading (National Center for Teacher Quality (NCTQ). One troubling observation I made is the lack of guidance to help teachers and soon-to-be teachers understand how to structure small group reading instruction. To be clear, guided reading, a popular small group practice, is a prevalent feature throughout these texts, and it is perplexing that this universal custom lacks consistency. Authors of these texts present guided reading in ways that reflect their personal views of how reading should be taught, and unfortunately many of these views are not reflective of what we have learned about best practices in reading instruction, especially for our very young and struggling readers.
A New “GuidedReading”
Guided reading was originally designedto provide a comprehension focus. However, now, guided reading has become a smallgroup catch-all wherein any reading skill, including ‘word work’ or decodinglessons are also taught.
Since the term guided reading is souniversal in our schools, I propose that we redefine this small reading grouppractice to empower teachers to TEACH first then GUIDE our students tobecome proficient readers. The structures I propose incorporate the mosteffective overall teaching practices and those specific to readinginstruction. Please download these two informative syntheses of the research onoverall effective teaching practices and follow along with me on thisjourney as we design a small group structure that is easy to use and adapt toour students’ needs. Principlesof Effective Instruction and SevenStrategies
The Small GroupStructure
We will create a framework, which maybe new to many of you, or remind you of lesson structures you have used in thepast. A framework helps us be more efficient in our planning – we all need that!If you use a reading program, it probably provides a lesson framework for you,steps that you follow. If you do not have a program, this framework will beespecially helpful for you. Either way, having a structure into which you plugyour lessons parts will ensure that you teach systematically and explicitly. Asyou read through this framework, know that it is just that. It will be up toyou to insert the content that is responsive to your students’ needs and planyour instruction for each part of the lesson in the framework.
The Small GroupLesson Framework
Our teacher lives are complex anddemanding enough. Having a consistent framework helps simplify our planning,and meets a requirement of systematic instruction – a routine that fills teacherand student need for consistency.
With a program, this framework will work. Insert the elementsfrom your program, add additional practice activities.
Without a program – It will take a little extra work on your part, but you can do it! You need a skills sequence, and words and reading materials that are matched to the target decoding elements listed in the skills sequence. You will also need practice activities.
The STEPS Framework– Teach then Guide
Adapted from Next STEPS in Literacy Instruction, Smartt and Glaser. Paul Brookes Publishing.
The frameworkworks well for decoding lessons, but is adaptable to teaching other readingcomponents as well.
S – Set up forLearning (The Warm-Up) 3-5 min
Begin yourlesson with a review of a skill students have learned. This serves to prime thepump for learning something new. This step wakes up the brain for learning,motivating students through active involvement at a high rate of success.
Guided Reading 101 My Blog Page
Choose theskill you want to review and plan an active way to review it.
Warm-Up Ideas: (Remember – use words and material students have learned in earlier lessons)
- Phoneme segmentation with head-waist-toes,
- Encoding from teacher dictation with moveable letters,
- Quick flash & say grapheme sounds, read, spell, or use vocabulary terms
- Student picks a word from pile, reads it and turn to partner, uses it in a sentence. Alternate turns.
- Reread story or sentences from a previous lesson.
T – Teach (I Do –Teacher Voice is Dominant) 3-5 min
In thisstep the teacher explicitly teaches the new skill through explanation,modeling, showing and telling. Students will hear you say, “Today we willlearn…” “Watch me. Listen.” “My turn.”
Ideas:
- Use a white board to model decoding the new grapheme,
- Point to and teach word parts,
- Demonstrate decoding of words
- Present and teach the orthography and meanings of vocabulary words
- Demonstrate a comprehension process
E – Engage (We Do– Teacher and Student voices together) 3-5 min
With yoursupport, students engage with, and briefly practice the skill just taught tothem. This gives the teacher an indication of whether the students need moreinstruction before the next lesson step.
Ideas:
- Students practice decoding words as the teacher points to words on a white board, a pocket chart, or with moveable letters as teacher creates them.
- Make sure students HEAR, SEE, SAY and WRITE the words.
- The teacher provides corrective feedback and scaffolds the process, stepping back to allow students to work independently, or stepping in to reteach, as needed.
P – Practice (YouDo & We Do – Student voice with Teacher voice when needed for correction,praise, reteaching) 15-20 min
In this step, students practice the new concept multiple times. Teacher guides students to apply what they have learned, providing more instruction, corrective feedback, and specific praise.
What Is Guided Reading Pdf
Ideas:Students practice their skill with –
Benefits Of Guided Reading
- Sound spelling boxes, (here is a video of a 2nd grade teacher using this practice process)
- Moveable letters to encode, (teacher dictates words and students tap phonemes and spell the words)
- Games to practice reading words automatically, (only games that ensure students are reading words MULTIPLE times) Here is a resource for these activities.
- Read decodable or other controlled text to practice the words just learned.
S – Show you Know(Assess learning) Quick 3-5 min
Duringthis closing step, students are asked to demonstrate their learning. Teacherswant to know, “Did the students master this skill?” Teachers keep data onstudent performance to help them plan future lessons.
Ideas:
- Students may read a list of the words just learned,
- Spell dictated words or sentences,
- Produce word meanings,
- Complete a timed progress monitoring measure.
Tipsto make your small group instructionpowerful!
My Guided Reading
- Reading and spelling – decode and encode – in the same lesson
- Engage students – we want multiple student responses.
- Include isolated word reading and sentence, story, reading.
Taught and guided… your small grouplessons will become easier to plan and teach when you use a framework in which youTEACH and students PRACTICE (a lot!) the skills you teach.