Before school even started in August, I began thinking about how I would keep myself organized this year. I knew I wanted to have between 5 and 6 groups and I planned how many times a week I would meet with each group. This chart was made before students walked through my door.
Once I did my initial Fontas and Pinell testing, I decided 5 groups would suffice and took away the Blue group.
One of the tedious, yet necessary parts of guided reading is the initial assessments to determine student levels. Following the initial assessment, I grouped students based on their reading levels and got started working with my groups as soon as I could.
The basics:
Every group has a color, each color has a folder with all their groups materials
Inside each folder:
Notebook (for recording observations)
6 copies of the text
Comprehension Questions
Group pacing guide
Fluency Routine (not included in the photo)
It's important for students to know the purpose of their guided reading time. Here's how I display my guided reading objectives
When students come to guided reading, I want them to know the routine and it's important to me to keep the routine the same throughout the school year.
We start our with our fluency routine, a one minute reading of a text at their level, I test one students while the rest whisper read to themselves. They record their words per minute on a graph.
Then we move into word work, the amount of time spent on this varies depending on the reading level that I'm working with. We like word sorts for some groups and word analysis for others.
Then I move into explaining what good readers do, show them what good readers do and them loose to try it on their own. While they are whisper reading, I meet with one students at a time and we practice together and I record their reading behaviors and goals for their next visit.
In the end, we come back together to either discuss our reading and our objective.
I found guided reading very challenging last year, but I'm loving how it's going this year - and having an organized system has played a huge role in that. If you're having trouble keeping your guided reading time organized, I hope you found this helpful - feel free to leave a comment about your loves and struggles with guided reading - I'd love to chat with you!
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Have a great week, teachers!
