by Frances Stanford

Created on: November 18, 2008   Last Updated: January 08, 2009

Guided Reading is an instructional strategy in helping children to become fluent readers, but it is only one important component of a balanced literacy program. Many people think that guided reading is a strategy to use only with young children, but it is very effective in every grade. This strategy can be used in senior high to help students grasp the concept of complex pieces of text so that they can better comprehend the material they read.

Before a teacher starts to use Guided Reading in the classroom, there are other practices that must be in place. Since it involves the teacher working with a small group of children in the classroom, the teacher has to spend some time teaching the students what they are to do and how they should act when this is taking place. In classes of younger children, they constantly want the teacher's attention, but during a Guided Reading session, the teacher is not to be disturbed because this interferes with the flow within the small group. If the students are not accustomed to using learning centers and working on their own for short periods of time, this is one of the most important preparations a teacher must put in place for this strategy to work effectively.

All of the students must be tested in order to find where they are on the reading scale developed by Fountas and Pinnel, the foremost writers about Guided Reading as an Instructional Strategy. The PM Benchmarks kit is one of the best ways of finding out each student's reading level. This kit consists of a series of small stories that a child can read in a few minutes. As the child reads aloud, the teacher uses a checklist and running record to record mistakes the child makes. Then the teacher asks the child questions about what was read to determine the level of comprehension. Using a mathematical formula, the teacher can then determine if the text was too hard for the child, too easy, or just right. This is called finding the child's instructional level.

Once all the students have been tested and their reading levels recorded, the teacher can group the children according to these levels. Each session for Guided Reading takes about twenty minutes. Each child has to have the same book, which the teacher distributes in the small group, which should not include any more than 6 or 7 students. The teacher does a walk through of the book with the students, looking at the cover and asking them to make predictions of what they think the story will be about. the students skim through

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