Moving Forward with Comprehension

After reflecting on my first year back in 2nd grade, I realized that my guided reading instruction needs improvement. This past school year I focused on guided math and I'm feeling pretty confident about that so now is the perfect time to take a look at reading. 

I'll be sharing my takeaways from the following chapters from Jan Richardson's Next Step Forward in Guided Reading:

Chapter 1: Guided Reading Essentials

Chapter 4: Early Readers Levels D-I (DRA Levels 6-16)

Chapter 5: Transitional Readers Level J-P (DRA Levels 18-38)

Chapter 7: Moving Forward with Comprehension Instruction 

This post will share my take aways from Chapter 7: Moving Forward with Comprehension.

This chapter focuses the comprehension aspect of reading instruction. The Top 12 Comprehension Strategies are shared along with 29 modules to address them. 

1. Comprehension Monitoring
2. Retelling
3. Developing Vocabulary
4. Asking and Answering Questions
5. Main Idea and Details
6. Analyzing Characters
7. Analyzing  Relationships
8. Inferring
9. Summarizing
10. Evaluating
11. Using Text Features
12. Understanding Text Structure

If you haven't visited http://www.janrichardsonguidedreading.com/resources-1, you should, she has many free resources to support her books. I also love the Reading Strategies Book from Jennifer Serravallo for comprehension instruction as well.   

I recently started reading groups and quickly realized that I didn't have enough time to do all the parts of Jan Richardson's lesson plan so I had to do some tweaking. Now I'm knee deep in running records to determine each child's instructional reading level. Once that's complete, I hope to jump back into reading groups. 

What resources do you use to teach reading comprehension?

Next Step in Guided Reading: Transitional Readers

After reflecting on my first year back in 2nd grade, I realized that my guided reading instruction needs improvement. This past school year I focused on guided math and I'm feeling pretty confident about that so now is the perfect time to take a look at reading. 

I'll be sharing my takeaways from the following chapters from Jan Richardson's Next Step Forward in Guided Reading:

Chapter 1: Guided Reading Essentials

Chapter 4: Early Readers Levels D-I (DRA Levels 6-16)

Chapter 5: Transitional Readers Level J-P (DRA Levels 18-38)

Chapter 7: Moving Forward with Comprehension Instruction 

This post will share my take aways from Chapter 5: The Transitional Readers (Levels J-P, DRA Levels 18-38).  

• As with early readers, complete a word knowledge inventory and a reading conference with each child.
• You want no more than four to five guided reading groups so you can meet with them three to five times a week. 
• Guided Reading Materials (pg. 171)
• leveled books
• dry erase boards, markers, erasers
• 6-8 sets of magnetic letters on individual trays or sorted in a box
• analogy chart
• guided writing journals
• personal word wall for guided writing
• timer
• 3 Day Lesson Plan, 20 minutes (pg. 172)
• Day 1- introduce new book, read book with prompting, discuss and teach
• Day 2- read book with prompting, discuss and teach, word study activity
• Day 3- guided writing
• Guided writing is coached, it is not independent or assigned writing. Students complete the response at the table with your support. 
• One question that was answered in this section was "Should I sometimes use nonfiction text with my transitional readers?" JR suggests that when you choose a nonfiction book, choose one that is at least one level below the groups current reading level due to advanced vocabulary. 

Next up, Moving Forward with Comprehension!

Next Step in Guided Reading: Early Readers

After reflecting on my first year back in 2nd grade, I realized that my guided reading instruction needs improvement. This past school year I focused on guided math and I'm feeling pretty confident about that so now is the perfect time to take a look at reading. 

I'll be sharing my takeaways from the following chapters from Jan Richardson's Next Step Forward in Guided Reading:

Chapter 1: Guided Reading Essentials

Chapter 4: Early Readers Levels D-I (DRA Levels 6-16)

Chapter 5: Transitional Readers Level J-P (DRA Levels 18-38)

Chapter 7: Moving Forward with Comprehension Instruction 

This post will share my take aways from Chapter 4: The Early Readers (Levels D-I, DRA Levels 6-16). 

• There are 2 essential assessments for teaching early readers: a reading conference and a spelling assessment (pg. 107-109). My last school administered the DRA (Developmental Reading Assessment) and the DSA (Developmental Spelling Assessment). We analyzed data from these assessments to form reading groups and word study groups. JR says that the number of errors is not as important as determining why the student made those errors and deciding what strategic actions will accelerate the child. All errors aren't equal. You should be asking yourself "what kid of action does the child take at difficulty? did the student monitor using visual information? is there a pattern in the child's errors?"
• Consider a "range" of instructional levels (pg. 110). Choose a lower level if you want to focus on oral reading fluency and a higher level if you want to practice decoding strategies. 
• Once you've analyzed the assessment results, form groups (pg. 115). JR suggests 5 groups max with 4 kids max per group. I can understand the logic of having smaller groups while students are at this level however I know it may not be feasible with 22-28 students in our classrooms. 
• For "early readers" it is wise to delay teaching comprehension strategies until students are independent word solvers (pg. 115) While this makes perfect sense, this may be unrealistic due to district standards. Our 2nd graders start the 3rd week with taking cold read assessments, and then take them every 3 weeks. My DRA ranges last year were from level 4-28 at the beginning of the year. JR says, "when choosing a strategy focus for this level, always consider self monitoring for meaning, work on monitoring for visual information word solving strategies and fluency. Once those are strong, choose retelling as a focus." 
• Guided Reading Materials (pg. 116)
• dry erase boards, markers, erasers
• 6-8 sets of magnetic letters on individual trays or sorted in a box
• sight word chart
• pictures for sorting sounds
• sound box and analogy chart templates in plastic sheet protectors
• guided writing journals
• leveled books
• timer
• 2 Day Lesson Plan, 20 minutes (pg. 117)
• Day 1- sight word review, introduce new book, read book with prompting, discuss and teach, teach a new sight word, word study activity
• Day 2- sight word review, read book with prompting, discuss and teach, reteach sight word, guided writing

Now that it's the last week of summer school I hope to jump into Chapter 5!

Next Step Forward in Guided Reading: Essentials

After reflecting on my first year back in 2nd grade, I realized that my guided reading instruction needs improvement. This past school year I focused on guided math and I'm feeling pretty confident about that so now is the perfect time to take a look at reading. 
I'll be sharing my takeaways from the following chapters from Jan Richardson's Next Step Forward in Guided Reading: Chapter 1: Guided Reading Essentials Chapter 4: Early Readers Levels D-I (DRA Levels 6-16) Chapter 5: Transitional Readers Level J-P (DRA Levels 18-38) Chapter 7: Moving Forward with Comprehension Instruction 
This post will focus on Chapter 1: Guided Reading Essentials.   **Shared Reading is the whole class mini lesson, JR suggests limiting this time to 10-15 minutes. Traditionally our shared reading block is usually 30 minutes long. Until I can see my master schedule, I'm not sure how I will structure this time yet.   
**She has a timeline for teaching routines and procedures for reading workshop that spans 6 weeks.  Week 1- students work in small groups for 10 minutes a day on easy independent "tub activities." These can include books, puzzles, journals, Legos, coloring books. These tubs will eventually be replaced by literacy activities as you teach students to be independent learners.   Week 2- introduce a literacy activity to each of the groups, while other groups are in tubs  Week 3- introduce a 2nd literacy activity to each of the groups, lengthen time to 15 minutes Week 4- introduce a 3rd literacy activity to each group, lengthen time to 20 minutes Week 5- introduce a 4th literacy activity to each group, students should be able to work 30-45 minutes without direct supervision Week 6- all students should be working independently with purposeful literacy experiences, tubs should no longer be required At my former school, teachers were required to be in guided reading groups by the second week of school and my biggest complaint has been that students could not work independently and I spent more time correcting behavior than instructing. While I'm not sure I'll take 6 entire weeks, I will be taking several weeks to build stamina. I usually have a list of Daily Literacy Tasks on the board for students to complete while I met with guided reading groups, on Fridays the students completed READ (Read to Self, Engage, At Seat, Daily Writing) Rotations while I pulled reading skill groups. Engage consisted of reading puzzles and games, At Seat consisted of literacy menus. 
**Book Boxes/Bags (as a literacy activity), JR recommends students have a personal box or bag that contains a variety of books for independent reading. She says to include books students have read during guided reading and other easy books they can read without support. This allows them to develop fluency and practice strategies on easy, familiar texts. This past year we sent the previous weeks' guided reading book home with the students, with the expectation that they were reading it at home... they weren't and I stopped sending home books the 4th quarter. I like this idea much better, that way I know students are rereading the books. 
**Other Literacy Activity Suggestions: buddy reading, writing, readers theater, poems and songs, word study and spelling, word wall, listening to recorded stories, oral retelling, computer, research. I'll probably do something similar to what I did last year. Using the READS acronym, Read to Self, Engage, At Seat, Daily Writing, Skill Practice and embed some of these options into those stations. 
What literacy activities do your students complete while you're working with guided reading groups?