In my past two posts Guided Reading: How and Why and Whole Class Guided Reading: Scratching the Surface and Making a Start, I have scratched the surface on how I approach Whole Class Guided Reading. In this post, I am to outline exactly how a week of lessons look in my class from planning to activities, to give you a clear guide in how you could teach it. As mentioned before, I am new to this approach, so I’m very much in the trial period of Whole Class Guided Reading.

For more information on how to switch to Whole Class Guided Reading, click here!

Choosing a Text or an Extract

The main idea behind Whole Class Guided Reading is that you are teaching children to develop/build on their reading skills. With that in mind, it doesn’t matter if you choose to use novels or extracts, as long as the skills are being taught. Personally, I have decided to use extracts, so that I can cover a range of genres and text-types per term. Take this week for example, I chose extracts from the fabulous book ‘Journey to Jo’Burg’ by Beverley Naidoo.

Find a PDF of the first chapter here: Chapter One

If you didn’t see my last post, this is how I aim to include and plan for the reading skills in my class.

Week One: Day One

As stated above, my aim was to focus on vocabulary and prediction. As this was a new extract, prediction is a natural skill to engage in. By looking at the title and front cover, children had to predict what they thought was going to happen in the story and what “issues or dilemmas” the characters could come into. It’s important to probe children to justify their predictions. This can be done, using sentence stems like below.

Having spent some time on prediction, we then actually read the text. I started reading initially, while the whole class followed along (an extract between each pair). This set the tone and pace of how I felt this story could be read. I then chose a different child to read different paragraphs, constantly giving positive praise and verbal feedback to how they are reading! For the last two paragraphs, we read together as a chorus. Children of all abilities could read along in the tone set by me, even if they stumbled upon some words, they were at least improving their fluency and expression while reading.

• Having read for 10 minutes, I then asked children 3 basic questions based on what we had read. We recorded answers on mini-whiteboards and I walked around assessing children’s understanding. This quick activity tells me:
• A) If they have understood the text at a basic level.
• B) If they can retrieve information from a text.

Furthermore, we then delved into some of the vocabulary from the first chapter. Journey to Jo’Burg is written with a mix between dialogue and action. We highlighted all the words that we didn’t understand as we read. Then, I picked 6 of these words to engage with for the duration of the class. I modeled how to read back for context. That means reading back the sentence or paragraph where the word is written and trying to “crack the author’s code” as I call it. Take the word ‘retorted’ for example. It was in a sentence like this:

We looked at the punctuation and words surrounding this word to help us to crack the code. I asked students questions like:

• What word normally comes after speech marks?
• At this moment does Naledi sound happy, sad angry etc?
• What do you think retorted means now?

In small groups, children discuss the meaning of the word. It’s a quick activity, but hones in on understanding. Then, I asked them to write down the 6 words we chose on mini whiteboards, along with the definitions in their own words. Like the picture below.

They then passed their mini whiteboard to a partner to match up to the definition.

To finish off the lesson, we played vocabulary charades. Children volunteered to “act out” a word from the list and we had to guess which one they meant- great for children of all abilities!

Week One: Day Two

Today’s aim was to focus on inference and retrieval! Today we took a nap of South Africa (where the story was set) to answer some inference style questions.

As there is no reading as such to model here, we read Chapter 2 in Journey to Jo’Burg as a class before engaging in this inference activity. Children stuck this map on colored sugar paper and in pairs began to make inferences about the map. The questions included:

1) Find evidence from this map that explains why the tar was hot in Chapter 2.

2) Find evidence from this map of 2 different dangers that the children may face while walking to Jo’Burg.

On the sugar paper, children then had to write the evidence to these questions. I provided sentence stems to every table so to scaffold children’s answers and guide them in the right direction. They looked like this:

As a plenary, I opted for a little explanation game. Using the map children had to pick which city/town they would choose to live in based on its location and explain why! Engaging with a map really worked on children’s skills, which can be applied to a text also.

Week One: Day Three

Today’s aim was an ordinary ‘bread and butter’ lesson. We focused on inference and explanation. We read the next chapter of Journey to Jo’Burg using modeled tone and pace from me initially. I then asked children to write down the main “issue” or “dilemma” that occurred in this chapter. We then engaged in a ‘conscience alley’ to model to children what a dilemma can look like. See an example of a conscience alley here.

Following on from that, we discussed any dilemmas that children may have had in their lives and how they over come them (thus making connections with the text). Children then worked in pairs to make connections between the text and their life, another text and the real world. They had a support sheet to in order to build upon and scaffold their answers (as we’re still learning).

Following this activity, we shared answers and as a class we peer assessed using ‘thumbs up or thumbs down’ whether the group had made an accurate connection. If any group were given a ‘thumbs down’ that person then had to advise them on how to correct it.

Unfortunately, we only have three guided reading lessons a week so this was all for last week. However, I have to admit, I’m much happier as we were originally allowed only one slot a week- yikes! Reading truly is the bread and butter to all aspects of learning and it can be fun and purposeful with just a few tweaks.

Any questions, comments or suggestions, please let me know in the comments below. Or head over to my Instagram to see more of our attempt at starting Whole Class Guided Reading.

 

Or to download some reading resources, click here.