Reading and Math Websites

Guided Reading

What is reading but silent conversation?
--Walter Savage Landor
 

Guided reading provides each child the opportunity to read at a level that is challenging to them individually and at the same time not frustrating.  Students are in flexible, changing, reading groups and lessons are built around books chosen specifically for that group.  Word work, and reading strategies are modeled, taught, and practiced within that group until a child's needs change.  Since groups are flexible and always changing, it is easy to find a group to meet each child's literacy goals all year long whenever needed.

Guided reading is based on the idea of children reading at a reading level that is not frustrating, not too easy, but  "just right",  their instructional level.    We want a child to read a text within the 90-94% range of accuracy to be at their instructional level.  If they are below that percentage, they tend to lose the meaning of the story and lose an important reading strategy as well, "does it make sense".  If the text is above that range, they are in their independent reading level, and unless fluency is a  concern ( how "smoothly" the reading occurs) there really aren't any teaching points to work with to validate staying at that level. 

 "Great literature, if we read it well, opens us up to the world and makes us more sensitive to it, as if we acquired eyes that could see through things and ears that could hear smaller sounds."            --Donald Hall