I have taught whole class guided reading in my class for two weeks now. If you’re new to my site, check this post and this post to find out more about how and why I have decided to use this strategy. I’ve used this strategy for well over a year now and seen some great success, especially in developing children’s critical thinking skills.

However, like all good things, they sometimes need a tweak to fit your class’ needs, so here’s how it’ll be taught this coming year in my class, and why.

For context, this is how I taught it to a Year 4 class: Whole Class Guided Reading: A Week Of

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This timetable works well, allowing us to hear children reading their home reader once a week. We cover fiction, non-fiction and poetry across a three week period, one genre a week to ensure children can apply their skills to different text types.

 

Monday-New Text-Vocabulary

Every Monday, no matter what the genre, I focus on Vocabulary with my class. Monday is the first day that they are coming in contact with a new text, meaning that they will struggle to tap into any higher order reading skill (such as inference) if they don’t understand the text on a basic level. As my current class are 7-8 year olds, I usually pick 4-5 new words that I want them to understand by the end of the session. Having read the text together, I’ll display the 4 new words like this on the board.

Click here for this resource.

From there, the children will underline these new words in the text in pairs. Then, I teach children the skill of reading back for context/meaning. They will never know how to do this unless they are shown. Children all read the sentence back to me that one of our new words is in. They then try and “crack the author’s code” and try to figure out what these words mean. Having discussed the new vocabulary and engaged with them as a class, the children will then engage with a vocabulary based activity- like this.

 

Click here for a FREE lesson plan on teaching vocabulary to upper primary.

 

Tuesday- Same text- Retrieval and Explanation

Retrieval is considered one of the easier reading skills, as it is primarily “retrieving” facts/information from the text. For this reason, I usually pair it with explanation. Like always, we read the text again, developing increased expression and pace as it’s the second day engaging with this text. I’ll then model the activity to the children, by allowing them to try this style of question on their whiteboards.

My class are young, so I ask them to draw a picture rather than quoting from the text. With an older class, I’d encourage them to quote exactly from the text and then explain why that quote tells us it is scary. The absolute key to the skill of explanation is sentence stems. Sentence stems show children explicitly how to answer these questions. The more they practice answering like this, the more it will come naturally to them in structuring their answers to ensure they’re including enough information in their answers.

Wednesday- Home Readers and Independent Task

So, this year, a big change is that we won’t be doing Whole Class Guided Reading on Wednesday each week. Whilst children are being heard daily during whole class guided reading, we want to ensure that we hear the children read the books we are sending them home with. While my support teacher and I hear a group each read, the three remaining groups are without adult support. Before we move to these groups to hear them read, they will engage in a Guided Reading Challenge Card from MrsMactivity. See my site review here.

 

This allows children to engage with their library book/home reader independently and may actually link up with some reading skills they’ve been taught earlier in the week. These challenge cards come in packs for all year groups and can work brilliantly alongside your reading lessons. Use code REBECCA at checkout for 10% off. (AF).

Thursday- Back to the Text- Summary or Sequence

Depending on the age of your class, you can engage with summary or sequencing. (Sequencing for young children). As we are returning to the text (from Monday and Tuesday) today, you should be noticing a difference in children’s fluency and pace while reading the text. Like always, I’ll model the task to children prior to “setting them off”. For sequencing, I usually display the statements on the board and ask them to figure out which statement happened first.

I re-word the statements so that they are not identical to the text that they know so well at this stage. I usually then in pairs, ask children to cut up these statements and order them in order. For an extension, I’ll ask the children to put the statements into paragraphs and maybe even give that paragraph a sub-heading. You’ll know how far your class can be pushed yourself.

For the older classes, they can engage with summary more so. Again, I would encourage the use of sentence stems for this to show the children how to structure their answers. Often I use these support cards to structure their answers.

Click here for these support cards.

Friday- Inference- Pictures, Music or Films

It’s important for children to be able to apply their reading skills to other media. I would consider inference to be the hardest skill to teach, as it involves looking for meaning beyond the text. I ease children into this skill by taking the text away. See below for more information.

What about children who can’t read as well as the others?

Whole class reading sessions are about building understanding and tapping into those critical thinking skills. Therefore, these children are able to listen and engage with the text, as it is being read. But also, by the end of the week, they will have heard it a few times and may be able to read more of it by then. Even if they can’t, it would be an awful shame if these children weren’t given the chance to develop their higher order reading skills, just because they cannot read as well. You could argue that they need it more? Some of my best inferrers are my weaker readers. Inference is about finding clues in what you read, or reading beyond the words. That’s why I use my Friday sessions to take the text AWAY so that we can all work on our inference skills. Your weaker readers without a doubt, still need to be heard 1:1, but that should be done in a different session or like us, one day a week to ensure you hear them read.

Click here for this resource!

 

For more reading resources, follow this link or to join my mailing list in this post. I send out weekly voice notes and pointers for implementing Whole Class Guided Reading. Furthermore, if you are looking for a list of quality texts for all age groups, follow this link!

 

All the best,