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It is my great pleasure to introduce Rachel Clarke as our guest blogger and something of an expert when it comes to guided reading it has to be said.

Here are some starter thoughts and ideas from Rachel to help teachers and TAs plan meaningful and effective guided sessions.

Organisation

Have you ever added up how many minutes per day you spend with each child in a class of 30 – not much is it? Guided reading ensures that every child gets 20 ring-fenced minutes of your time every week of the year. Put guided reading immediately after lunch and you can guarantee that lost sweatshirts, grazed knees and football disputes will eat into your reading session. Likewise, put it on a Friday after awards assembly and you can rest assured that you’ll only have 5 minutes before the bell goes for play. Choose a time for guided reading that won’t slip away and use it to give the children that extra special bit of time with you and a book.

Focus

Really effective guided reading sessions have a sharp focus. Try keeping to just one assessment focus / reading objective; ask questions for and try to make notes that assess just this.

Use your assessment notes to inform what you plan next; not just for the guided session but the work children will do before and after the session with you. This way you prepare the children for their work with you and then you can assess their ability to apply what they’ve learned through their independent activities. This also saves you time in having to ‘come up with ideas’ for the independent groups to do during the session.

Independence

If you do guided reading every day for 20 minutes that’s 100 minutes per week – each child gets just 20 minutes of that with you. What do the other 80 minutes look like? Make sure that children have high quality opportunities to prepare, practise and apply their learning during this time. (Try using some of the ideas here). The quality of the independent learning taking place in the classroom is as important as the guided work that you are doing with your small group. (Even Ofsted inspectors would agree with that)

Inspire

Reading a dull text is bad. Then having to answer questions about it is even worse! Engage children by choosing the most inspiring texts you can find. There are some reasonably good published guided reading schemes available.  Thinking Child’s Mini Tales offer complete short stories that still provide challenge – and all in ‘one read’, which can be quite motivating for many children at Key Stage 2. But using real books, including picture books, will encourage a love of reading which extends beyond the guided reading session. A twenty minute exciting ‘taster’ of a book introduced by an enthusiastic adult will be more likely to encourage children to then pick it up and read it for themselves. We have a duty to ‘infect’ children with reading and a guided session is a great place to do that.

KISS

Keep it simple, stupid! – don’t over complicate. Guided reading is a mini-lesson. You haven’t got time for tonnes of whizzy teaching tricks. Keep the plan focussed and don’t spend too long planning it. Minimal planning for a mini-lesson.

Prime them

Before they read, tell the children what you will be asking them about. This gives them focus for their reading and also helps them to locate the information and formulate their responses

Get equal

Challenge the teacher-pupil relationship by encouraging the children to ask you questions about the text. The small group size of guided reading makes it a great place to teach children (and yourself) about this dialogic relationship. Providing children with some question stems based on Blooms taxonomy helps them to come up with questions to ask you and their peers. This strategy takes practice but once you’ve all mastered it you won’t look back!

Flip it

With children who’ve mastered decoding try ‘flipping’ the learning. This means providing children with the text prior to the guided reading session so that the time you spend together is for discussion and analysis rather than reading the text.

If you nurture a culture of it being ‘OK not to know’ then they should feel safe to come to the session full of questions about the things they don’t quite understand or found tricky to read and you can get started on unpicking these much more quickly.

Shuffle them

It is unlikely that the groups should remain static for an entire academic year. So, use your periodic assessments to shuffle the guided reading groups from time to time. It will depend on where children’s learning needs are at any given time- and will inevitably link to writing objectives too.

Rachel is also the author of the Teacher/TA Booklet that accompanies the 10 short stories in The Mini Tales Pack – All of these are digitally available when you join The Thinking Child Network.

The Mini Tales digital pack provides a series of easy to use and effective session plan suggestions for each of the titles. Teachers and TAs can use the Mini Tales to teach a range of reading skills at Key Stage, including the promotion of inference and deduction and other thinking/questioning skills.

For more about Rachel and - why not visit her blog page http://primaryenglished.co.uk/blog/

You can also find contact details to enquire about the training she offers around guided reading.

To find out more about The Thinking Child Network and download some sample resources  - just click on the logo