Is there too much emphasis on guided reading in primary classrooms? It's a question that many educators, like kindergarten teacher and literacy coach Cathy Mere, are starting to ask. Guided reading provides opportunities to teach students the strategies they need to learn how to read increasingly challenging texts, but Cathy found that she needed to find other ways to help students gain independence. While maintaining guided reading as an important piece of their reading program, teachers need to offer students opportunities during the day to develop as readers, to learn to choose books, to find favorite genres and authors, and to talk about their reading. In More Than Guided Reading, Cathy shares her journey as she moved from focusing on guided reading as the center of her reading program to placing children at the heart of literacy learning--not only providing more time for students to discover their reading lives, but also shaping instruction to meet the needs of the diverse learners in her classroom. By changing the structure of the day, Cathy found she was better able to adjust the support she was providing students, allowing time for whole-class focus lessons, conferences, and opportunities to share ideas, as well as reading from self-selected texts using the strategies, skills, and understandings acquired in reader's workshop. The focus lesson is the centerpiece of the workshop. It is often tied to a read-aloud and connected to learning from the previous day, helping to build skills, extend thinking, and develop independence over time. This thoroughly practical text offers numerous sample lessons, questions for conferences, and ideas for revamping guided reading groups. It will help teachers tweak the mix of instructional components in their reading workshops, and provoke school-wide conversations about the place of guided reading in a complete literacy curriculum.

Classroom-tested strategies and model guided reading lessons for emergent, early, developmental, and fluent readers.

In an era of change in education, the time is right to refocus attention on guided reading practices. Guided reading remains an anchor in classroom literacy programs, but how has it changed with the new shifts in education? In this book, Dr. Michael P. Ford provides a practical resource for guided reading. He explains how it evolved, why it's still important, how to fit it into a comprehensive literacy program, how to select texts, how to assess and support students, and how to position it for intervention. Also included is an Appendix with a listing of recommended guided reading books.

Ideas, resources, and a list of childrens' books that can be used to implement guided reading.

Author Debbie Diller turns her attention to small reading groups and the teacher's role in small-group instruction. Making the Most of Small Groups: Differentiation for All grapples with difficult questions regarding small-group instruction in elementary classrooms such as: How do I find the time? How can I be more organized? How do I form groups? How can I differentiate to meet the needs of all of my students? Structured around the five essential reading elements - comprehension, fluency, phonemic awareness, phonics, and vocabulary - the book provides practical tips, sample lessons, lesson plans and templates, suggestions for related literacy work stations, and connections to whole-group instruction. In addition to ideas to use immediately in the classroom, Diller provides an overview of relevant research and reflection questions for professional conversations.

Every elementary teacher deals with students who struggle as readers on a daily basis. Each struggling child is complex and each has a unique history as a learner. In One Child at a Time, experienced literacy specialist and consultant Pat Johnson provides a framework she has used in numerous K-6 classrooms to help teachers understand and assist individual children. The four-step process outlined in the book enables teachers to focus carefully on specific strategies and behaviors; analyze them with theoretical and practical lenses; design targeted instruction in keeping with current research on reading process; and then assess and refine the teaching in conferences with the child. The framework is by no means an easy answer to a difficult problem, but through its use teachers learn how the reading process works for proficient readers and how to support struggling readers as they construct their own reading process. The text is packed with examples of actual conferences with students, detailing how and when Pat and her colleagues intervene to instruct and assess. The examples of follow-up assessment and analysis of struggling readers over days and weeks provide an indispensable model for teachers. Pat shows how to use this framework successfully with a range of learners, including young children, English language learners, and students in the upper elementary grades who are stalled in their literacy progress. She builds upon her decades of work as a classroom teacher, literacy specialist, and consultant in schools with high poverty and diversity, to demonstrate how this framework can be useful in any setting.

This is an easy-to-follow resource that explains how to transition successful Guided Reading strategies into the upper grades. It provides strategies, differentiation suggestions, and practical tips for successfully incorporating various genres of literature into instruction to keep students motivated and interested in reading. This resource is aligned to the interdisciplinary themes from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills and supports the Common Core and other state standards.

Geared towards primary school teachers to understand the foundation for literacy development

This book offers essential guidance to preservice and inservice teachers seeking to create, revise, or add new strategies to the teaching of the language arts block. The focus is on how to implement effective strategies in the context of a well-planned classroom and a smoothly choreographed daily schedule. In a series of vivid case studies, Lesley Mandel Morrow brings to life the methods used by exemplary teachers to create rich, student-friendly learning environments for children in grades K-4. No component of organizing the language arts block is omitted, including setting up and running classroom learning centers, assessing different instructional needs, conducting whole-class and small group meetings, and linking language arts to content area instruction. Enhancing the practical utility of the book are sample daily schedules and classroom management tips for each grade level, along with dozens of reproducible learning activities, lesson plans, and assessment and record-keeping tools.

Discover a model for guided reading instruction that fits the 18-minute time frame and is purposeful, planned, and focused. This practical book introduces a range of specific reading strategies and processes that lead students to access increasingly sophisticated text. It includes collections of lessons for emergent, early, developing, and fluent readers, as well as struggling readers in the upper grades. Detailed and comprehensive, the book champions an integrated system of guiding readers that involves both fiction and nonfiction, as well as the texts that surround students in and out of school: websites, directions, instructions, schedules, signs, and more. New and experienced teachers will both find a wealth of valuable reproducibles, techniques, tips, and strategies that will help them put the tools for independent reading into the hands of every student--Publisher description.