Guided Reading

My article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/747803?seq=3

This article starts with talking about practice and how it is the best way to increase reading fluency.  By giving the opportunity to students to practice their reading they are going to learn and continue to grow in their reading.  It those goes into guided reading practices.  It says that this practice is one of the most common ways that reading is taught in the classroom.  It involves having students take turns reading passages or sentences aloud and having the teacher their to guide the reading and help if needed.  The oral aspect of this reading is very helpful not only to the child reading but the children that are also observing them read.  Although this is helpful for average and higher level readers it is often hard for low level readers.  Since they are going to read in a slow or inaccurate matter there isn't much time in this type of lesson to help them with their reading.   Because of their slow nature they are more likely to read less words which in the long run allows them to have less practice.

A way that teachers can supplement that is by giving weekly assigned readings.  That way a student has to perfect that specific reading in order to move onto the next reading.  This is better than the alternative of having the child read a different passage every day and not being able to master them.  This also helps them master specific decoding skills that they need to read texts more fluently and to be able to comprehend the texts that they read.  There are some studies that show  that although this is a method that can be done it doesn't always work on every reader or with every story.  Although it is beneficial to read things repeatedly it may not help the reader unless there are similar words in the next reading.  That being said though if the books have sight words in them then it would be helpful because rereading those and getting to know them will be beneficial to them.

I think that students can learn a lot from listening to one another and by having the teacher there to help guide them through the reading.  I think that having a reading table can really help your classroom with guided reading because you can take those that are reading the same book and bring them to you to be able to do read aloud. By having a smaller group it allows those who aren't reading as well to not be embarrassed by a large number of people.  This can also help figure out who those lower readers are because sometimes they get lost in a large group and this can help you give them the more specialized attention that they need.  

This is a worksheet that I have used in the classroom to help with Guided Reading.  

This is a book that I have and it gives great advice and such about how to incorporate guided reading in the classroom.

Questions:

1) Did your teachers ever incorporate Guided Reading in the classroom? If so how did they do it?

2) Do you think that Repeated Reading is helpful or detrimental to students that are struggling with reading?