Guided Reading Lesson

Learning to read is not a finite process.  Those who do read are always learning to read throughout our adult lives.  We may not think in these terms, but we are constantly engaged in guided reading mini-lessons when we read.  As experienced readers, we adjust our reading while analyzing fiction or non-fiction; when we read technical manuals and find illustrations and captions on the page; we continue building our vocabularies, and much more.

Guided Reading Lesson: Focus on Specific Reading  Levels

Guided reading groups small numbers of students who read on similar levels, allowing the teacher to focus on challenging that specific group.  The group will work together and individually, with the teacher directing activities planned to advance their common level. The teacher ensures that each student is working at the right level.

Guided Reading Lesson: Extending What the Meaning of the Text

Once young students have passed the threshold of beginning reading with understanding and fluency their adventures in reading have just begun.  Guided reading uses all the language resources of the student to get more and more out of a book or article.  The teacher guides students to draw upon their prior knowledge of a subject to make associations with what they are reading.  She then poses questions based upon what the students already know about the subject and this helps them to focus and read with greater understanding and clarity.  The students may be asked to re-read the book or a section of it, answering a different set of questions: this will draw different conclusions from students.  This is how we extend meaning in reading: we draw more complex relationships among all aspects of a book or article.

Guided Reading Lesson: More than Words

The guided reading teacher selects books of many different kinds analyze and relate to what they are reading.  The illustrations, like the section of the book to which they relate, might tell a story in themselves.  A technical book may have more charts and graphs and drawings than it has words of text.  The choice of book is important in challenging the student to wring every bit of meaning she can out it.

Guided Reading Lesson: Range of Skills

Guided reading lesson ask students to use all the skills that are part of a school literacy program: word study and vocabulary building; writing assignments and English skills that relate to the reading; and increasingly higher levels of comprehension and connecting the dots?  When you put these three areas together often separate in traditional reading programs students learn to draw more complex relationships and develop better problem-solving skills.

Guided reading lesson include of the above and much more than can be laid out within the confines of this article.  To learn more, ask your child’s teacher for guided reading lesson you can use at home.  Perhaps she will conduct guided reading lesson for you.  (Yes some schools do this for parents!)