Guided Reading and Graphs

- Guided reading is a teaching strategy used by educators to promote interest in books and the development reading skills in children of all ages. It involves a teacher scaffolding children’s learning at an individual level by assisting children only when necessary as they read aloud in their carefully assigned group(s) to decode words and comprehend what you read/was read to you.

Confused at all? Well, don’s be! Below is an easy to follow checklist of the essential parts in a high quality guided reading lesson:

Children are grouped in a purposeful manner that takes in to consideration thing such as interest and ability.

Children have some influence/control over what they are reading.

Children’s learning is being monitored by a teacher as they work, especially decoding.

The teacher is ready and willing to assist any child who they realize needs some extra help with their reading development, or asks for the teacher for it.

When monitoring groups the majority of your time is spent working with the lower level children, who need the most assistance.

Children’s comprehension of the content is being developed/promoted by the teacher through the use of various strategies and activities.

• Video response

Overall I really enjoyed watching the video. It was very informative. The only way that I think it could be improved would be by giving teachers more strategies for after teaching. I felt that overall the video was lacking in this area. Other than that though, I really liked everything. I think that many of the ideas I would be able to used in my own room. I especially like the ideas of having cards to show vocabulary on. 

• http://www.readinga-z.com/ is an amazing reading resource for elementary grade educators! It provides pretty much everything needed to teach a reading other than students! The resources are set up in categories beginning with what books to use for what level (with access to the books) and ending with information on teaching special populations of children. Additionally, in the other sections it talks about  topics from developing reading skills to methods for assessing, and all that in between. The site has built in tools for organizing the materials you like, so you will not lose them either. However, there is one thing about the site that I did not. You have to be a (paying) member, or sign up for a temporary free trial to actually access any of the the materials.

• Specific ways to use items from this site for guided reading:

Promote ESL children’s comprehension of by having them read the same story as the rest of their group in their native language, before reading it as a group and discussing the content.

To find and provide reading material to the classroom that matches child(ren)’s specific interest as well as learning objectives.

To get synopsis's of books from that you can read to children before having students rank the options in order of interest.

Look at the preplanned lessons to get ideas for facilitating groups, and for how to use strategies such as questioning to improve children’s comprehension of a story.

Provides templates for assessing reading in different ways, for various traits and in multiple languages.