Guided reading - how effective?

[raspberryroop]

Any professional opinions on guided reading ?

I flipping hate doing it but it is a great way of listening to 6 children reading at the same time! And when you have 30 kids to hear each week it makes things a lot easier.

Am a TA but realise I sound very unprofessional.

Am v v v v tired......................

Once a child has learnt how to read, they need to work on understanding the text. This continues all the way up to studying Shakespeare at GCSE / A Levels.

Discussing a text with 5 or 6 children is a reasonable way to teach them these 'higher order' skills.

It does seem a lot of work for the teacher to read with every child every single week or even more often.

Children get reading books home and should be heard reading by their parents every day anyway. So if parents read and discuss the books with the child on a daily basis, is it really necessay for the teacher to do it every single week?

This was a question I was going to ask as I don't understand what guided reading is. Ds is in Reception and on Friday his teacher said not to worry about his book being changed (he's had Eggs now for nearly two weeks) as they'd done lots of guided reading that week. Could somebody please explain guided reading in Reception?

Guided reading is when a group of kids read the same text and discuss it together. The content of the session will depend on the group's ability and the type of text being studied.

I don't particularly 'enjoy' guided reading, but I do think it is valuable as a way of getting some intensive teaching time with small groups, and when looking at 'text-level' stuff (comprehension, looking at genres etc) it is far better than individual reading, because the children learn from each other. They also learn about discussing in a group, and taking turns etc.

I do it with Reception and with Y1, and once they are decoding fairly well it works, I think.

I think teaching of reading (decoding) takes place (mostly) during phonics sessions; teaching about understanding text types / comprehension is during guided reading; and practising reading skills is perhaps best done by individual reading (at home or at school, with an involved and interested adult, parent or teacher).

Some parents, I know, are dubious about guided reading because they would rather their children read individually with the teacher. I think it shouldn't be one or the other, but a mixture of both.

So a reading group should all be of a similar ability?
How often would the group change? If one child came
on in leaps and bounds suddenly ?
And as dd hadn't ever read to her teacher (I know, according to her but I'm a working mum not a school gate mum) how often should she be doing guided reading per week?

She keeps telling me reading is so boring. She only wants to do writing.
She is getting weekly gold stars for writing! Hence I can see her enthusiasm.
But reading! What a chore. She won't look at the words. When she does though, she can read! Very well.
I'm not planning on taking action. Reassurance will suffice

A guided read might only be done once a week.

I have 30 children to read with.

With the SEN group I try and read with them every day.
I move up or down the register reading with each child and then decide that I might read with a whole group of PURPLE readers - 6 or 7 children. I would decide what we were focusing on - maybe looking at connectives or how to use punctuation and then we read together.

I would then write in their diaries that 'Jack read in a group today.'

That would probably be the only time Jack would get to read with me or the teacher in a week.

This is Y2.