Guided Reading

I confess; I love guided reading. I never mind planning guided work and I certainly enjoy delivering it. I love choosing the texts and thinking about how the children are going to enjoy reading something new and exciting for the first time.  I like thinking about how to use the book to it’s best advantage, drawing out the richness of the text and the pictures.  Of course to be able to do that you do need the resources and the rich text and illustration. Book 4 level 6 simply will not do for really engaging children with reading and books.

I’ve seen some fantastic guided reading sessions and also some that were quite the opposite. Most of it came down to preparation and knowing the text. Just picking a book at the right level will not necessarily give you the results you need. For example, I observed a teacher using a simple phonically decodable text to try and teach objectives about plot and prediction. Needless to say, it did not work as there was almost no plot or prediction in the book. If she had used a book like Not now Bernard by David McKee, she could have got everything she wanted from the text.

There are two issues that particularly impact on the quality of guided reading; one of them is time for the teacher to read the book, particularly in KS2, and the other is having the resources there in the first place. You cannot however teach a guided reading session without having read the book and I never feel reading a book should be an arduous task, but rather a pleasure! With the issue of resources, many schools library services (where they still exist) have collections with multiple copies of books. They are always delighted to be asked and it tends to be a very underused resource.  I have also been known to trawl local libraries for multiple copies of texts as well!

So you have your book and you are all prepared. How do you go about getting the most from this session?

Book introduction: This does not always have to be “look at the cover, what do you think the story is about?” or reading the blurb. You can just introduce the book, talk about the author or just get stuck in without a huge preamble.

Strategy check, including any words that may be beyond readability at this point and reminders for using phonics as a first strategy and phonemes already taught. This is particularly important for KS1 and it is also an opportunity to introduce names as these are often not easily decodable.

Independent reading: the children now read, the book or a few pages/chapter. They have an objective as part of their reading, like what is the character of John really like? Or find all the ways the author sets the scene. They do not read as a round robin as then they are only engaged a sixth of the time and can easily switch off. During this time you can go around the group and hear a few of them read aloud.

Return to the text: this works well in pairs, when they discuss what they have found out from reading. It is important that a lot of this can be a personal response and that children understand there is not always a right or wrong answer, but rather opinion and justification using the text.

Response to the text: The whole group then gets together and discusses what they have read.

Many books will require more than one session to really understand fully and to actually read. With a larger book I would ask children to read it at home prior to the sessions, otherwise they lose the thread of the story and it takes forever to get through.

If you would like a copy of a guided reading plan for The Very Hungry Caterpillar please contact me on Twitter @phonicsandbooks.