A walk through guided reading
This article is brought to you thanks to a delve down the back of the sofa, a rummage through the kitchen drawer and a computer file clear out.
You may remember the Primary English website had a facelift last year which saw us rise like a multicoloured phoenix from the ashy greys of our old website. To be fair it was a bit more than a facelift; more of a structural rebuild that saw us knock out a few retaining walls and open up a whole new space that we simply weren’t using to its best (yes, I’ve been watching Grand Designs again). In fact, it was such an enormous hole that we lost one of most popular videos down it and have been looking for it ever since. That is, until a spring clean of epic proportions unearthed a copy of the missing video on a friend’s hard drive (thank you Katharine). And so it is, with great pleasure that I can now redirect you to the video of yours truly teaching Guided Reading in KS2. Now the video is a bit more wrinkly than in the past (you would be too if you’d been languishing in the darker crevices of someone’s hard drive) but it still does the job of modelling Guided Reading.
It’s a walkthrough of Guided Reading done the traditional way. There are two lessons included, and both start with a strategy check that feeds into the main teaching, there’s reading done by me and the children, questions and chat, and follow-up tasks relating to the text. The children are great; they share their thinking, ask questions and formulate responses collaboratively. They’re lessons built on knowing texts well so that I could lead children through exploratory learning. This is very much the approach we take to guided reading here at Primary English and which we apply to all the reading teaching sequences that we write.
And here’s the thing… our guided reading video may exemplify small group guided reading, but there’s nothing in the lesson that you wouldn’t want to do with children in a whole class reading lesson, if this is how you teach reading in your school. Good reading lessons rest on knowing the text well, asking interesting questions and providing children with the time to explore a text individually, in pairs and as a group or class.
We are adding to our range of guided and whole class reading teaching sequences all the time.
In our guided reading teaching sequences you will find:
An overview including a detailed lesson plan and answers to all activities
Sufficient independent activities to support learning for at least one week including written comprehension questions
An editable lesson plan for you to adapt to meet you class and your school’s planning requirements.
Our whole class reading teaching sequences come in a fully editable format. These include questions and suggested answers to support learning on each day of the sequence. These plans are an excellent starting point for teachers looking to develop a half-term length sequence for children in upper Key Stage 2.
So, now that we’ve relocated our much loved Guided Reading video, we invite you to take a look to see how our lessons can help you plan a deliver great guided reading.
If you liked this post, you may also like this article: Guided Reading