Reading Pedagogies One Stop Shop
Every now again I like to curate blogs on a theme. In this blog, I’ve brought together some of our articles about teaching reading. These are not the articles about reading skills such as inference, retrieval or summarising et cetera (I’ll save them for another time). Instead, these are some of our articles about the structural approaches to teaching reading such as guided reading, whole class (guided) reading and close reading: reading pedagogies.
Guided reading
We’ve written several articles about small group guided reading over the years. One thing that I think is important to stress, is that best practice in small group guided reading can easily applied to whole class approaches. Indeed, the best whole class guided reading I see in schools includes a range of spoken language activities such as group discussions, Readers’ Theatre performances, Hot Seating and drama. Guided reading articles that you may find of interest are:
This article provides you with a list of approaches and quick gains to use in your guided reading lessons. The article also includes links to our popular free to download Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 Reading Prompts for the reading content domains.
In this article we share a video of me teaching two groups of children using the traditional small group approach to guided reading. As with our other articles about guided reading, in this blog post and video you will find ideas to use in your whole class guided reading lessons too.
Based on our observations in classrooms, this article takes a look at approaches good teachers use to ensure their guided reading lessons really sparkle. The article considers different approaches to questioning and how to shake up the teaching order so that children come to lessons having already read the text. And yes, the strategies included in this article can be applied to your Whole Class Guided Reading Lessons.
Whole Class Guided Reading
One of the challenges with Whole Class Guided Reading is how to ensure that the needs of all children are met during the lesson. This means ensuring there is sufficient challenge for able pupils and that there is support for those children striving with reading. In our article our expert, Gemma, sets out approaches you can use to ensure all pupils are included in your whole class guided reading lessons.
Close Reading
Close reading is not a widely used term in the UK, yet it’s done in a great many classrooms where Whole Class Guided Reading is structured around a short text that’s read and reread over a series of days. If this is how you teach Whole Class Guided Reading or you want to know more about this particular reading pedagogy, this article is a good starting point.
And, while you’re here. If you’re looking for resources to support you with teaching reading, visit our resources page for small group and whole class guided reading planning.