Guided Reading
Love it or loath it, guided reading remains one of the most frequently used strategies for teaching reading in the UK. In this post we collate a range of ideas to help you plan and deliver top-class guided reading lessons.
Organisation
Have you ever added up how many minutes per day you spend with each child in a class of 30 – not much is it? Guided reading ensures that every child gets 20 ring-fenced minutes of your time every week of the year. Put guided reading immediately after lunch and you can guarantee that lost sweatshirts, grazed knees and football disputes will eat into your reading session. Likewise, put it on a Friday after awards assembly and you can rest assured that you'll only have 5 minutes before the bell goes for play. Choose a time for guided reading that won't slip away and use it to give the children that extra special bit of time with you and a good book.
Focus
Really effective guided reading sessions have a sharp focus and stick to it. Try keeping to just one or two aspects of the Content Domain. Ask questions focussed on these aspects and try to limit your assessment notes to these aspects too (see our guided reading prompts at the bottom of this page).
Even more focus
Use your assessment notes to inform what you plan. Not just for the guided session but the work children will do before and after the session with you. Again, stick to your focus. This way you prepare the children for their work with you and then you can assess their ability to apply what they've learned through their independent activities. This also saves you time in having to 'come up with ideas' for the independent groups to do during the session.
Independence
If you run guided reading sessions every day for 20 minutes that's 100 minutes per week. Whilst each group gets 20 quality minutes with you, what do the other 80 minutes look like? Make sure that children have high quality opportunities to prepare, practise and apply their learning during this time. Good guided reading is not about Ofsted, but should you be worrying about the ‘special visitors’, they are just as likely to look at the quality of the independent learning taking place in the classroom as the guided work that you are doing with your small group. Our guided reading packs come with sufficient linked activities to keep your class meaningfully engaged in learning for a full week. Click below to learn more about our highly-regarded guided reading packs.
Inspire
Reading a dull text is bad. Having to answer questions about it is even worse! Engage children by choosing inspiring texts. There are good published guided reading schemes available but using real books, such as those that we’ve used for our guided reading teaching sequences will encourage a love of reading which extends beyond the guided reading session.
KISS
Keep it simple, stupid! – don't over complicate it! Guided reading is a mini-lesson. You haven't got time for tonnes of whizzy teaching tricks. Keep the plan focussed and don't spend too long planning it. Minimal planning for a mini-lesson.
Prime them
Before they read, tell the children what you will be asking them about. This gives them focus for their reading and also helps them to locate the information and formulate their responses
Get equal
Challenge the teacher-pupil relationship by encouraging the children to ask you questions about the text. The small group size of guided reading makes it a great place to teach children (and yourself) about this dialogic relationship. Providing children with question stems can help them to come up with questions to ask you and their peers. This strategy takes practice but once you've all mastered it you won't look back!
Flip it
With children who've mastered decoding, try 'flipping the learning'. This means providing children with the text prior to the guided reading session so that the time you spend together is for discussion and analysis rather than decoding the text.
Shuffle them
It is unlikely that the groups should remain static for an entire academic year. So, use your periodic assessments to shuffle the guided reading groups from time to time.
Further resources and ideas
For further ideas for guided reading take a look at our post Guided Reading: From Good To Great.
Our FREE to download guided reading prompts are great for helping you plan questions for each aspect of the reading Content Domain.
Originally published on LoveToReadToMyClass.Wordpress.Com this article was updated on 1st March, 2019 and again on 23rd January, 2020.
Read a fuller version of this post on the Teach Primary Magazine website.