Transcript

Here is my Guided Reading station. Here is where I have individual students or a small group of students, maximum four, maybe five. Students that are at the same level of reading or writing depending on what it is that we are going to work on. We have different things that we do here. For example, here there's an activity where they will read the words and then I can ask them to organize those words to make a sentence that makes sense. They get to sort them in a way that will form a sentence and read it back. It's flash cards, sight words, and also having this idea of words put together to make a sentence that makes sense.

As you can see, I use different colors. The reason for that is if they get mixed, then I can easily put them back together because all the greens form a sentence. The orange form a different sentence and so on. When the kids are working, they know that they're color coded and there's no confusion. Some books that I like to use as well, they have different titles. The reason for that is because they're leveled. So they have different texts, stories, fiction and non-fiction, procedures, all kinds of things here. I have many copies of the same book, so all the students get the same copy and we do activities together. For example, we can read at the same time or we can have one student reading at a time. Sometimes depending on the level, I ask them to read quietly a page, and let me know when they're done. I ask them did you have difficulty with any of the words, and if they say yes, then I ask them how do you solve the problem, what strategy would you use? 

In our school and in many schools, we have books that we share. For example, these ones are at DRA level 34, level P. There are many books like this that are the same. For example, this is a higher level. What I do with this, students at this level is that we get the same books. They are independent readers already, so they don't need me here when they're reading. They go off and read. A few days after, when they have finished, we gather and then we have a discussion. What it is that we learned, what did you like, they ask each other questions. They love doing that because they feel really good about being independent readers and also demonstrating that they understood what they've read. 

Something that I use during my guided reading sessions is Mr. Puentes Pensive. My students love it because they know that when we're doing guided reading sessions, I get to open the book and that's when I keep track of all the things that we do every day and their progress. Here, I have all kinds of information that I use and keep track of the dates when I read with each one of my students. Every student has a section of my book where I keep track of their reading and writing progress. There are many things and elements that I can pay attention to such as fluency or decoding. What problems that particular student is having, is it with the ending of the words or the beginning of the words, or blending sounds? So it's very useful to have a book like this to keep track of all the progress that the students are having.

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