Teaching and Learning with Intent through Guided Reading Activities

• September 7, 2010 by Terri Zezula

While each educator has their own techniques for getting themselves and their students involved in the task at hand, guided reading activities offer wonderful structures for bringing students and their teachers together, and engaging both in the teaching and learning process. At its essence, guided reading is a metacognitive activity; it gets students and their teachers to think together about how they think about reading. By literally guiding students through reading, it instills the habit in students of being fully present in the process. Such habits not only lay the foundation for effective reading skills, but they build successful strategies that will lead to a life-long love of the reading adventure.

What do guided reading activities look like? While these activities can take many forms, they can be as simple as questions designed to create thoughtful, intentional approaches to a text and create connections before, during and after reading.

Before diving into a text, guided reading questions we could pose to young students might be:

• What do you think the artwork on the cover means?
• Based on the title, what do you think the story will be about?
• As you flip through the book and glance at the pictures, what do you think the story will be about?

During reading, we can stop students along the way and re-engage them through asking:

• What does that picture mean to the story? How does it make you feel?
• What do you think will happen next?
• Why did that character do that?
• What would you do if you were that character?

After reading, strategically formulated guided reading questions can help students connect to and appreciate a story:

• Can you summarize the story?
• How does what really happened compare with what you predicted would happen?
• Who was your favorite character and why?
• What was your favorite part of the story?

Additional guided reading activities may include creative exercises such as writing letters to characters, drawing pictures inspired by stories, or writing alternative endings.

These processes and teaching techniques are most effective for small groups or one-on-one instruction, as they depend upon a high level of personal interaction and response with the teacher. (Thereby lies one of the reasons that Scientific Learning’s Reading Assistant is so effective; it employs many activities formulated on the principles behind guided reading.)

On a closing note, these kinds of simple questions are not only great for engaging students in the classroom, but also at home. If we as educators can offer these as examples to parents, imagine how much we can help them make even the simplest bedtime story a more engaging, meaningful experience for a child.

Categories: Brain Fitness, Education Trends, Reading & Learning, Reading Assistant

Tags: academic success, child reading development, creativity, early learning, guided reading, how children learn, learning to read, reading comprehension

Teaching Children to Read

• July 6, 2010 by Martha Burns, Ph.D

According to the Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read Reports of the Subgroups, the capacity to learn and grow as a reader depends on five essential skills:

Foundational Skills for Beginning Readers:

1) Phonemic Awareness: The insight that every spoken word can be conceived as a sequence of phonemes. Phonemes are the speech sounds that are represented by the letters of an alphabet.

2) Phonemic Decoding: The ability to capture the meaning of unfamiliar words by translating groups of letters back into the sounds that they represent, link them to one's verbal vocabulary, and access their meaning.

Skills Needed to Read for Meaning:

3) Vocabulary: Understanding the words in a passage, including the specific dimensions of their meanings or usage that matter in context.  For example, knowing that “tree” when reading about a “family tree” has a different meaning from “maple tree”

4) Fluency: The ability to read with sufficient ease and accuracy that active attention can be focused on the meaning and message of the text and the text easily retained.

5) Comprehension: Thinking about the meaning of each segment of the text as it is read, building an understanding of the text as a whole, and reflecting on its meaning and message.

Teachers today are fortunate to have access to a wealth of scientifically based research into what works when teaching children to read.  The links that follow are courtesy of the National Institute for Literacy:

Birth to Early Childhood

Children begin building literacy skills long before they go to school.  Even very young children can be prepared to become successful readers later on.  Research has identified certain skills that are important for later literacy development; these skills include knowing the names and sounds of printed letters, manipulating speech sounds, and remembering what has been said for a short time.  Here are some ways to teach younger children these pre-reading skills.

Childhood

From kindergarten through third grade, young readers are actively developing all five of the core reading skills from phonemic awareness to fluency and comprehension.  Research has shown that teaching children to read successfully during this window requires a combination of strategies and instructional approaches.  Teachers must know how children learn to read and be able to tailor instructional approaches to individual children--especially those who are struggling readers.  Here are some instructional approaches for the five essential skills.

Adolescence

While many adolescent readers have mastered phonemic awareness and decoding, they are often still challenged to fully understand what they read.  In middle and high school, it is common for literacy skills to be developed not only in language arts courses, but also in a variety of different content areas.  To prepare students for the literacy challenges of secondary school, language arts and content area teachers need to focus on the last three components of reading: vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.  Here are some approaches to teaching vocabulary and comprehension skills.

What are some strategies you have used when teaching children to read?  Which have been most successful?  Share your expertise on our Scientific Learning Facebook page!

Categories: Reading & Learning

Tags: child reading development, early learning, elementary learning, elementary school learning, fluency, high school learning, how children learn, improving reading skills, intervention, learning through play, learning to read, literacy, memory, oral language skills, phonemic awareness, phonics, reading comprehension, reading intervention, struggling readers, struggling students, teacher effectiveness, teacher impact, vocabulary