Guided Reading Lessons

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Guided Reading Lessons
By Beckie

Our school has a book room with books "leveled" from A-M. When school starts we check their folders to see what level they were reading at in June, and go back 2 levels to be safe. We have a lot of books from Rigby and Scholastic.

I
don't like more than 5 kids in a group.
1) Introduce story, and up to level G I give them the whole story, problem, solution, and we take a quick picture walk as many of the words they will encounter are in the illustrations. Around level H I start to leave out the ending and discuss it at the end instead.
2) Children read the story out loud, ALL AT THE SAME TIME. This

is VERY hard to get used to, but as opposed to round robin reading, they are all reading, no one is just sitting waiting for their turn, nor embarrassed to be reading alone. AS children get stuck, you have your little individualized teaching moments.

3) If any children finish before the others, hand them an "old favorite", a book they've already read several times. This builds fluency as they have to spend little effort on decoding and can work on the flow of it.

4) When all the kids are done with the book, you do your mini-lesson based on the book. When just starting out and getting familiar with each story, your lessons are kind of impromtu. If the book rhymes, you would focus on the rhyming words. If there are a lot of compound words, you can do a quickie on them.

Each group meets 10-15 minutes and it's good to have only 4 groups unless you have a remedial person pushing in. Centers keep the other children busy, but an hour is tops.

If you are using a basal, you can still do guided reading groups, but having a library of leveled books keeps it more individualized.

As the kids reach levels J,K, L I will sometimes give them questions to write answers to to get them ready for third grade but not until March or after.

Hope this is helpful!