Guided reading

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These lively innovative Guided Reading sessions involve revisiting two well-loved texts.At Gade Valley Primary, Herts, reception teacher Jenny Berry begins by encouraging the children to look at th...

These lively innovative Guided Reading sessions involve revisiting two well-loved texts.At Gade Valley Primary, Herts, reception teacher Jenny Berry begins by encouraging the children to look at the book cover. She then reads a lively story about a frog who meets a wide range of animals. The children are helped to sequence this familiar story, joining in at key points using speech bubble prompts and relevant puppets. These puppets are then placed around the school garden and pupils are expected to retell the story sequentially at each puppet station. At Princess May School in Hackney Class 2 teacher Joy George is re-introducing her guided reading group to Little Red Riding Hood. Having focused on the plot sequencing, she moves the children onto matching physical attributes to the right story characters. They then look at punctuation and the decoding tricky words. Finally Joy gives a tip about the ideal size of a guided reading group.

We explore two very different KS2 Guided Reading Groups: Princess May Primary in East London, an inner city school whose pupils have English as an additional Language and Gade Valley School, Herts, which has a more homogenous rural intake. Both sets require creative and energetic teaching to help their children reach their full potential in reading. The techniques employed to capture pupils interest are relevant to KS1 and KS2 readers of all ability ranges.Princess May Primary Headteacher Stephen Spooner is fortunate in having a Spanish Year 5 teacher, Giovanna Ionta, leading the guided reading with a mainly Spanish-speaking group, some of whom still struggle with complex English words. At Gade Valley School we follow the progress of a mixed average and below average group of Class 4 readers. The guided reading session is based on the non fiction topic of friction. Adding guided reading to the school's APP has significantly lifted standards in reading throughout the school.

At Princess May Primary in Hackney most pupils have English as an additional language and many also have additional Special Educational needs. As a result some pupils are still struggling with their reading in Class 6. Learning Support Teacher Jo Goodwin groups children according to ability rather than age and uses extensively props, such as horses or dragons, for her SEN guided readers. For such children she advocates additional orientation to help the child navigate the story by prior discussion of the title, blurb and picture on the cover. She also encourages children to articulate what they already know about a topic and to predict what is likely to happen next in the book.For the guided reading session we are following she chooses a book about travelling between the two poles.

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