Blogpost Lisa L. Smith January/ February
Reading Essentials by Reggie Routman Chapter 10 (Examine
Guided Reading)
I read the chapter about guided reading as I have begun
pulling my students in small groups to work on different styles of books and
reading. The school provided some “Bob”
books which I am using in small groups to hone in on phonics and sounding out
small words. In addition to using
phonemically based books, I am using predictable books, non-fiction books, and
nursery rhymes to help the students work on skills such as decoding, rhyming
words, and picture to text correlation.
I enjoyed reading the chapter about guided reading as it so
closely related to my present practices.
I thought the information on keeping the groups flexible was very
enlightening. We do tend to level
students and keep them in the same groups.
The benefit in letting a stronger reader work with a struggling reader
is that the stronger reader has a chance to explain, strengthening their
skills, while the struggling reader may benefit from the example of the
stronger reader. It made me change my
groups up a little. I was able to do
this with nursery rhymes especially because they were able to read the rhymes
together and then talk about things they noticed like rhyming words or words
with “s” that might mean more than one.
I have been doing charts with the children of labeling
pictures. I thought that might be a good
thing for the small group to read together as the label has an arrow to what it
is labeling. I am still considering how
to implement this into a guided reading practice, possibly drawing interesting
books out of the labels they make for the picture chart.
I also noted that it talked about using guided reading
outside small group settings. I am
thinking about ways in my mind to implement it more into whole group and
individual instruction. The chapter made
me really reflect on my practices and institute a few changes such as
groupings.
You are so right--our youngest readers need to read a wide variety of literature, from books that are simpler to decode to more complex literature that they can listen to in a read-aloud to immerse themselves in how writers craft language. Your reflection on flexible groupings is important, too. It takes a lot of effort to use formative assessments and create groups that change day by day to meet students' immediate needs, but it is so worth it! Recognizing that our "flexible" groups aren't always that flexible is the first step to making changes. I'm glad you got so much out of this chapter!
ReplyDelete