Tips to Maximize Guided Reading Instruction
Guided reading is one of my favorite times of the day! I love getting to spend time with a small group of my students focusing on building relationships, cultivating individualized reading instruction for your students, and supporting their learning. Guided reading instruction with 2nd graders is a marathon of maximizing every second of that small group time to provide the most meaningful and impactful reading instruction for your students. I want to share some tips I have learned along the way to do this effectively.
Guided Reading Groups
In order to plan the most differentiated, targeted lessons for each guided reading group you should ensure that students in a group are on the as similar reading levels as possible. I strive to look at each students’ needs and try to match the groups to have the same instructional targets. This helps me to plan modeling and practicing decoding, fluency, and comprehension lessons for the students’ needs. Read more about how I form my groups here.
I use assessments from professional development books listed below to gather data on readers’ strengths and weaknesses to help in forming appropriate groups. This also helps with lesson planning to see what students need to work on!
I check students’ ability to:
- self monitor
- solve words- beginning, middle, and ending sound
- read fluently
- retell
- use oral language skills
- take risks
- read for meaning
- monitor for meaning
- monitor for visual information
- take words apart
- know sight words
- self- corrects
Profession Development Books That Helped Me
I read this professional books to help me best understand the guided reading structure and how to maximize my time with my students.
- The Next Step Forward in Guided Reading– if you are only going to read one book, READ THIS ONE!! This truly shows a break down in how to assess, plan, and teach students at each reading level. It provides lesson plan outlines, data collection charts, and assessments for you to use. The picture below is a little peek inside what is included!
Other reading books that help shape my shared reading and guided reading instruction:
What Guided Reading Looks Like
I always start my guided reading group with decoding warm up cards. We do this for about 30 seconds to get students settled as they arrive at the table and incase I need to run over to another student during the transition to help them. Students thrive on having a routine and expectations set from the moment they arrive at our guided reading station.
Then we go right into our lesson which begins with introducing a new story or summarizing where we are in a current text. Depending on the level and needs of the students reading a text during guided reading can look different. It can be students alternating reading a page aloud, reading to themselves silently, or all reading aloud at the same time. When students all read aloud is when I can lean in and assess for decoding and word solving strategies.
Using the lesson plan from The Next Step Forward in Guided Reading and preplanning my leading questions really helps to maintain focus throughout those 15 minutes. We know that time can really fly by!! We have oral discussions as well as use white boards for students to record their thoughts or answers.
Assessment In Guided Reading
I keep notes and running records using the data charts I showed above from The Next Step Forward in Guided Reading. Seriously, I don’t know what I would do without this book!
To assess comprehension I often use pinch cards like shown below. I have pinch cards that have A-D, yes/no, and true/false. I have questions written out ahead of time and ask the students to show me their answer choice on the pinch card. This can be done without students seeing each others’ responses. This is a great way to prepare for high level thinking questions that students see on standardized testing!
I hope that this gave you some ideas for how to maximize that precious time with your students during guided reading! Read more about planning, managing, and running reading centers!