Guided Reading: Building A Bridge to Independence

Guided reading is the bridge between shared reading and independent reading. It is an instructional strategy that helps students become better readers. It can be used in many different grades, but it is most common in kindergarten, first, and second.

Guided reading provides the opportunity to apply reading strategies in a supportive environment. With the teacher’s guidance, students can better use new skills such as: sight words, decode words, use context clues, look at word structure, and decide if a word or sentence makes sense. During these guided times of reading, the teacher is able to scaffold students to a higher level of performance in a risk free setting.

At this time of the year in kindergarten, I am very concerned that students learns to track print. It is my upmost objective during each lesson. I call this strategy: Point at the word your voice is saying. After reading the “real” books, I like to use “paper” books, to provide a take-home hands-on opportunity with text. This set of emergent books with a Christmas Theme, are great examples of paper books that awards opportunity to provide strategic practice with text.

--Portions of this blog post first appeared at Hameray's blog