Chapter 3 of The Next Step of Guided Reading

It's time for this week's look at the Freeblicious book study,The Next Step in Guided Reading: Focused Assessments and Targeted Lessons for Helping Every Student Become a Better Reader . I'm loving this book. If you haven't checked it out yet, you should. It is a great resource for guided reading.

I read this chapter while I was on the beach a couple of weeks ago and I was ready to go teach some guided reading right then. I felt like I finally knew what to do with guided reading. I have read several posts about this chapter all ready from the hosts of the chapter and I'm not sure I have anything earth shattering to add. Marsha from A differentiated Kindergarten wrote an incredibly thorough post about the nuts and bolts of the chapter. Jeannie from Kindergarten Lifestyle wrote a great post about tracing letters.
There are two groups of students that Richardson addresses in this chapter. The first is the Pre-A group which is the group that still needs to work on letter knowledge and names. There are four parts for this group that need to be done every time:
1. working with letters and names
2. working with sounds
3. working with books
4. interactive writing
You should work on each of these components each time and work with the group between 15 and 20 minutes. What I really liked about Richardson's outline was that she gave a time frame for each activity.

It breaks down like this:

One of the other points that Richardson makes in this chapter that really stuck with me is the idea that you ask questions about the book that the kids have to answer in complete sentences. This is especially good for the ELL students. I have had a third or more of my class be ELL students the past few years so I'm always looking at ways to help these students. I've also noticed that kids don't seem to have conversation skills anymore. They watch a lot of tv and some of the kids that I work with don't seem to talk a lot to their parents.
The format for the emergent readers is pretty similar but instead of working with letters and names they are working with sight words. Richardson recommends not moving on to a new word until the previous words have been mastered. I typically use the sight words that are in our reading series. In our old series, we had one word a week in kindergarten and then eventually 2 words. In the new series, we start with 1 for the first 10 weeks, then move to 2 words for 5 weeks, then it's 6 for the last 15 weeks. This is a lot more words than I'm use to teaching in one week for kindergarten. I will be using a lot of Richardson's strategies for these learning words. She encourages a lot of writing of the sight words. This is something that I have always found important. I expect my kids to be able to write as well as read the sight words. Here are a couple of her strategies for sight words:

There is tons more information in the book, including some great planning sheets. I know for me the biggest thing is timing. I hope that having this breakdown of time will help me to stay on track with my groups and get what I need to get done. I also love that I have a format to follow. I can plan my groups easier and plan groups for my assistant. I have a half day assistant in kindergarten and a full day assistant in first grade. I'm terrible at planning things for them to do like that. It's hard for me to verbalize what I want done. So I'm hoping using a format like this will help that issue.
Be sure to head over to Marsha's blog and link up with your guided reading thoughts: