Guided Reading With Kath’s First Graders

When I was in Kath’s first grade room a few weeks ago, she wanted me to model some guided reading lessons.  I took one of her higher and one of her lower groups. My intention was to show how I can teach the same standard to both groups of kids, just modify a bit. I also wanted to show how I could use nonfiction text to teach the different ways to approach a text.

Guided Reading Lesson (Higher Readers)

Word Work
For our word work time we started off by talking about word endings, er and est.  They had been working with word endings during their phonics and this book was full of them.  After building a few words we looked through the book to see if we could be detectives and find some of them.
Picture Walk
We explored that nonfiction text could answer our questions. So we looked at a few of the photographs in the book and talked about what we thought the author would teach us on that page. Kath had been working on questions words, so we put our thoughts into questions. Then, I gave them each one of the text boxes below. I had them write their question.

Independent Reading
We had now set a purpose for reading. It isn't necessary for the kids to read the entire book. They looked through the book to find a picture where they thought the author might answer that question and read only that page. If it answered the question, they wrote it on the text box, if not they looked for another picture where they thought they might find their answer.
This was a good way to show them that we don’t always read an entire non fiction book, only the part we are interested in or the parts that answer our questions. I did send them off with the book in tow so that they could finish reading the other parts that interested them.

Guided Reading Lesson (Lower Readers)

Word Work
With one of her lower groups, we also looked at word endings, but this time only adding an “s” to words. We were working on the same standard, just at a different level of difficulty. After building some words, we looked through the book to see if we could find any of those words.
Strategy Practice
Kath was doing a lesson on Arctic Animals, so I constructed some pattern text and invited the children to think of Arctic animals to put in each of the boxes. We talked about the text on the page until they noticed the pattern. We talked about how patterns can help us read. Once we figure out the words in the pattern, the rest of the pages were really easy. Then, at the bottom we added a “surprise” ending just like real authors!

Independent Reading
Then, we went back to the book to see if we could find a pattern there. And they did! We worked together on the first page, then I said the rest of the book is going to be so easy because you already know the pattern.