Balanced Literacy: Guided Reading

During GUIDED READING, I'm not sure I look as calm, cool, and collected as the teacher in the picture above! LOL! Anyway, it certainly does feel like Guided Reading takes a lot out of me on some {most?!] days. What is interesting is that if you take a look at the Balanced Literacy graphic - - GUIDED READING is in the lower half of the circle. That means that the students are getting less teacher support. Teachers give more support (do more of the work!) during MODELED and SHARED READING!

Storage & Materials

I keep all the Guided Reading supplies in this area, located next to my teaching table. The 7-drawer cart is from Wal-Mart. It was $19.97. The gray hardware drawer containers are from Wal-Mart. Each was less than $10.00.

The top three drawers house miscellaneous teaching supplies such as magnetic white boards, expo markers, an eraser, magnetic cake tins, highlighters, highlighter tape, and cut-apart sentence supplies (glue, sentence strip paper, scissors). We have our reading strategies student posters (to help us remember what strategies we can use when we come to a tricky part or word. We also have our ABC chart, for the low level group for a shared reading experience. The bottom four drawers are used by each of the four reading groups. One drawer per reading group. I house the week's reading books in there along with their reading response notebooks.

Lesson Plans

This index card box (5x7) is where I store my GR lesson plans. I print them, trim them down, and then laminate. At the start of each day, I gather all the needed materials for each group, and make sure each group's drawer is ready to go! We have a pretty extensive collection in our Guided Reading Book Room. I've written some lessons plans, but am far, FAR from being done. I've stopped writing them for now. Maybe at some point in time I'll continue. You can download the zip file that have lessons from levels 2-17 below.

Our school has a large book room. It houses our leveled Guided Reading books. There are generally 6 (sometimes more) copies a book for each title. The books are ordered from various publishers/vendors: