Guided Reading: Reading With Children

Within Chapter 5 of Catching Readers Before They Fall, the authors discussed the many components that make up a comprehensive literacy framework within a classroom. These components included read-alouds, shared readings, guided readings, independent readings, morning messages, community writings, and independent writings, each of which are divided into two major categories. The first is reading to, with and by children, while the other is writing to, with and by children.  The chapter goes onto state that is important that both of these areas are addressed within the classroom because they work together to help students develop effective reading process systems. According to Marie Clay, “Writing can foster reading competence and vice versa if the learner becomes aware of the reciprocal nature of these acts. Reading and writing can be learned concurrently and interrelatedly” (1998, 138). This means that students can practice and use both reading and writing activities simultaneously to help them better comprehend how texts work.

           

While reading the chapter, one component of the comprehensive literacy framework stood out to me as something I had just seen in my current field experience. More specifically, last Thursday, I witnessed a small group of forth grade students participate in a guided reading practice with their teacher. In order to do this, the teacher called on six of her students to meet her in the back of the room for a round-robin read aloud. Each student took a turn reading a chapter from a book about the colonial period in American history. The teacher posed questions, answered questions, and had an open dicussion about what was going on in the text while they read together.  Also, just as stated in the book, the teacher played the role of observer by recording any important information that could be used to help the students form their reading processing systems in the future.

I thought it was very interesting that I was able to see one of the ideas outlined in the book done in real life. Even more so, it was cool to tell that techniques such as this really work in the classroom setting. While my field experience teacher worked with the small group, they all seemed very engaged and involved in the reading process. I could see them using their reading strategies to get through the text. I also noticed all of the information that the teacher was getting by both interacting with the students and observing them read. Overall, performing guided reading with the students in the classroom can be very benefical and, ultimately, can help students grow as readers in the long run.