Yesterday I shared how what my kiddos do while I am working with small groups. Because I have had quite a few readers ask me how I do my small groups/guided reading groups, I thought I would go through a typical lesson.
For the most part, I use the model in this book:
This book was written by Beverly Tyner and I was lucky enough to watch her do a variety of lessons and teach inservices while she was hired by our county. She is super helpful and really does want to help teachers do the best they can when it comes to teaching small groups in a differentiated manner.
For my groups, I have 3 groups of 6 kids and we meet EVERY day. This is super important to me, and something Dr. Tyner gives instructions on in the book. For classes who have more children, she also outlines how to meet on a different schedule. When the kids come to group, they have this box with the materials we need:
We always have our hands in "ready."
Right now, my first two groups are working on the same thing in phonics (word families), but are on different book levels because of how many sight words they know. My other groups is still working on letter names and sounds. Here is our lesson from today (each lesson always follows the same outline, so the kids always know what to expect):
We start with a reread of yesterday's story. The kids have to use their pointer finger so that I can make sure they are tracking print correctly:
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| This is the group's book that is still on letters...level 1 and repetative text |
My first two groups quickly review our blends and digraphs with this wonderful chart from Katie King (click
here to see):
When we have time, I have the first two groups work very quickly to spell three CVC words:
Then, we move on to word study/phonics:
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| We sort words according to their word families and the kids write them |
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| This is our big board for sorting our words for word study |
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| This group is sorting pictures by beginning letter sound and writing the letter |
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| Our big board for sound sorting |
Then, we review our sight words and play a sight word game...each group is working on a different list
After our game, we look at our new read for the day. We make predictions, inferences, etc. and take a picture walk together. While we are reading, I ask questions related to the story and to our phonics skills:
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| This is a harder book that the first group read today...level 5 with more complex text |
Then, the first two groups get a dictated sentence to write (I forgot to take a picture) and the last group works with me to write a sentence, cut it, and put it back together.
After our group lesson, I have the kids go buddy read their new book to 2 friends (this starts after we clean up that round of workshops, so while I am starting a new group, the last group is buddy reading) then go to their workshop.
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| Our reading folders |
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| The person who listened to the book has to give a smiley then the reader ranks themself on how they read...you can get this log here. |
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| They LOVE buddy reading! |
The basic outline of my small group lessons can be foudn in Dr. Tyner's book along with all the word study, sight word,and phonics materials.
Sorry for the super long post, but I hope this might help clear up some of what we do. This is the second year I've done it this way and I can honestly say, I love it and have seen it work wonders in my children. You can see more about Dr. Tyner
here. By the way, I don't get money or goods to write about how great I think this format is, I just wanted to share because it works :)
I made our 100th day cake that I've made every year since I started teaching and since it was miracle to get it baked last night with Ellie Grace helping me {as in wanting to not be put down...which is fine by me :)}, I let the kids help me decorate it.
The kids loved the cake, but I think they loved making our 100 piece trail mix even more. I think we all finally can remember that ten groups of ten is 100!
