Guided Reading

 (http://heartofateacher.blogspot.com/2012/07/guided-reading-or-not.html)

For this weeks topic we instructed to find an article on guided reading and blog about it.  I found an article title "But I only have a basal: Implementing guided reading in the early grades."  I found this article quite interesting and helpful because it had some good information about guided reading in general, and some ideas of how to incorporate it into ones class.

According to the article, guided reading is designed to help students become more independent and fluent readers by teaching them reading strategies.  The approach is that the whole class, or a group from the class, reads the same book at the same time in class.  The teacher guides them along and instructs them.  By doing this she is able to show them strategies at work that will improve their reading when they are reading alone.  Usually it is best to divide the students into groups by reading ability for guided reading.  This way they are able to read on their level and work with other students that are on their level.  This requires teachers to have lots of different books across different levels, and that there are multiple copies of these books.  This is not always accessible or practical in a public school classroom.

The authors of the article suggests that there is another way to do this.  They say that guided reading can be taught through the use of Basal Readers that school already has.  They have multiple copies and the readers do have different levels of stories in them.  This way the teacher does not have to buy multiple copies of multiple books on multiple levels, which would get rather expensive.  The authors give examples of teachers that have used this approach successfully.  Both examples agree that it is a good way to get into guided reading and have found good use of basal readers for guided reading.

The authors close their argument by saying that guided reading is most important in lower elementary grades, and that guided reading with older students is sometimes inappropriate and not very helpful.

When I was in school I do not remember doing a lot of guided reading.  I was in a couple of classes in middle and high school where we all read the same book at the same time it what seemed liked guided reading, but as the author points out this may not have been very helpful.  While younger we did do some guided reading from our textbooks or basals as this article calls them, but it seems most of our reading in our Reading textbooks were assigned to be done at home with our parents.

Do any of my readers remember having a teacher that focuses a lot on guided reading?  Do you think it was helpful?

Concerning large collections of books with multiple copies, not many of my teachers had this luxury.  I few of my teachers had class sets of maybe three titles, but they did not have variety.  Our library also had a few class sets, but again they did not have very many of them.  Did anyone go to a school that had a large selection of classroom sets of books?