One of the areas of teaching that took me longest to get my head around when I was an NQT and RQT was Guided Reading.  No matter how in-depth I read the plan, no matter how many lessons I observed, I just couldn’t make it work in my class. How did I keep the rest of the class on task while I was reading with one group? Why were groups practicing handwriting during a reading session? Do the other groups make any progress if not with the teacher? I hated it, but knew how significant and effective it could be if done right!

As a teacher, I have to be honest and say that Guided Reading had always an area of stress and unclarity. Teachers (including myself in the past) are unsure what to do, how to plan for it, how to fit it in. Many times teachers would completely miss it out altogether as they are unclear as to what they actually need to do. It’s very much a “grey area” in a lot of schools.

Most of us know that the key skills and focuses are: VIPERS (as seen on The Literacy Shed Blog). But how many of us have hammered down and planned how to actually teach these skills? Ideally, all of these skills should be taught weekly, however that can sometimes feel like you’re chasing each  week to cover them all. I tend to group some together, for example: retrieval and explanation, retrieval and summarise  or inference and explanation. I know in my class, our area of weakness is inference and vocabulary, so I’d rather spend isolated lessons on those skills at the moment.

By missing out on Guided Reading, our children are losing interest in reading, forgetting key reading skills and this essentially, has a knock on effect in other curricular areas, such as understanding word problems in Maths. Reading is the bread and butter of learning and it’s something we need to pinpoint and define how to teach, so to support teachers in teaching Guided Reading! The curriculum makes it clear that children are expected to become:

• ‘independent, fluent and enthusiastic readers’.
• ‘able to read silently’.
• readers who have good understanding, inferring the meaning of unfamiliar words.
• readers who can discuss what they have read.

No matter where you teach, no matter what curriculum you teach, these are the basic expectations of our children in Reading. These four aspects (individually or together) should be the foundation to any Guided Reading sessions. Once your children are learning any of those strands, you’re helping them to achieve these expectations.

So your key points for any Guided Reading session are:

1. Every Guided Reading session should make children’s reading better.

2. Guided Reading activities must build towards children becoming independent, fluent readers, as well as having the ability to read silently. (For younger children, this is obviously not a priority but the idea is that we’re guiding them to become silent readers).

3. Children should be taught to infer unfamiliar words from the context of the text. Understanding the text at a deeper level and essentially “reading between the lines”, for want of a better phrase!

4. Children should be able to discuss what they have read afterwards, showing their understanding of the words and not just how to read them.

5. Teacher focused groups should be a concentrated skills focused section, depending on the needs of the group.

With those points in mind, you now need to consider whether you’re going to approach this as:

• Whole Class Guided Reading

Or

• Carousel Guided Reading

I’ll be writing a follow on post to why I’ve switched to Whole Class Guided Reading but, if you’re more comfortable with Carousel Guided Reading then that’s up to you! The same key points can be applied to your session, no matter how you teach it! Either way, Guided Reading should be:

• 30 mins daily.
• A mix between fiction and non-fiction texts.
• A mix between teacher & child read aloud.
• 10 mins max on the actual reading.
• 5 mins modeling of the task.
• 15 mins task.
• Mini plenary too, to check understanding.

Be it ‘Whole Class Guided Reading’ or ‘Carousel’ each approach revolves around an activity. Some activities you could do, after a text or extract has been read are:

• Ordering events of the story.
• Summarizing what has been read.
• Sort statements into ‘100% True; Could be True; Definitely False’.
• Create a glossary of new vocabulary.
• Rating the effectiveness of certain vocabulary.
• Explaining why certain phrases/punctuation has been used.
• Find evidence to show that… (using a highlighter).
• Compare and contrast two extracts, what’s the same & what’s different?
• Draw a map to show where the text is set.
• Predict what will happen next/at the end based on what we know.
• What words tell us that…
• Pre-Reading of the extract for tomorrow.
• Predict/Act out the next scene, taking on the role of…
• Add captions to pictures in the story to show understanding.

These tips should help give your Guided Reading sessions some clarity and focus. It is also worth going and observing other teachers doing Guided Reading in your school to pick up tips and tricks. Agreed, it is adding extra work/planning/resourcing but at the end of the day, Reading is a subject in itself and should be planned for! It’s the foundations which set our children up to grow as learners.

To get you started or to give Guided Reading a go, get your free copy of my first session using this approach. As well as my follow on lesson based on inference skills! They’re aimed at Year 4/5 (age 8-10).

If you don’t already, follow me on Instagram: Rebecca.the.Irish.Teacher to see how I do my Guided Reading sessions or see this post on how to convert to Whole Class Guided Reading.

Or to download some reading resources, click here.