Thoughts on guided reading please

[SandyChick]

My sons school dont do any guided reading but i feel that he could really benefit from it.

He is in yr2 but only turned 6 last month. He is on red books for reading.

He is improving and I'm not overly concerned but I'm really surprised that they don't do any guided reading at all.

He is on red reading books and had been since reception.

When I mentioned last year that I was surprised they didn't do any guided reading especially when I think ds would really benefit from it I was told that they obviously do read during the lesson and that the teacher just doesn't have time to sit down with each individual child.

Should i push for it?

Ah that would have been useful in colour. The RWinc reading books we had just had black text and the stories weren't as interesting as the Songbirds, and there weren't many at the 1+/2 levels, but that could just be the pack we had. They have done well with the read write inc approach at school though, the school don't seem to use their reading books - it's a real mixture of old oxford reading tree, songbirds, project x and some of the newer phonics ort books. At least they get used to a variety that way though.

I was going to say too that many people have said to me that reading is almost like a switch which goes on somewhere between 3 and 7, and not necessarily linked to future achievement. For dd1 she was towards the 7 end of that spectrum, dd2 seems to be at that point at 6, and dd isn't quite 4 and already reading, blending etc. The school should be giving him more books and ideally more support in the classroom and definitely worth discussing with teacher but don't worry for him too much at the moment as he may well suddenly get it and never look back.

I agree 3birthdaybunnies, DS1 clicked by the time he was 3 and was reading Roald Dahl books before he started school, DS2 on the other hand is in Y1 and is still sounding out phonetically built words. I have no idea why they are so different but we haven't done anything differently. The RWI seems to really help DS2 as really understands the difference between words he can sound out and the tricky words .

At our school, we change books as soon as they have been read at home. So for some children that's daily, for others it's weekly, others somewhere in between.
The TA (me) goes through all the book bags every day and changes all of those that have a note in the reading record to say book finished.

If he was in my class in year 2 on red books he would be getting additional support - even my very, very weakest are on blue. In fact, I only have 1 year 1 child on red and 1 on pink. (That assumes the colours are in the same order at your school as mine of course.)

Extra reading with a teacher is unlikely to be the best way of helping him (although useful) - he needs additional phonic support ie something like Bear Necessities or Dancing Bears, or precision monitoring, or one of the other phonic interventions out there. I am sure others with more experience than me will be along with advice soon.