Teelah Harris-Routman Chapter 10- Blog Post #6

What is guided reading?  How in the world am I going to implement this in my classroom?  What should I do?   What should my students be doing?  All of these questions went through my head when I heard the term guided reading.  Only seven weeks from the end of the school year, I still feel a bit confused, but this chapter helped to clear up some questions that I had. When I originally found out that I would be meeting with small groups during guided reading, I immediately began to think reading centers.  All summer long, I kept trying to look up suggestions for Daily 5 in the upper elementary grades.   I tried finding literacy games to help create literacy centers.  Chapter 10 of Routman made some thing a whole lot clearer.  Routman made it clear that students main task during this reading time is reading.  Students who are in the guided reading group should be reading with the teacher, while the other students should be reading in connection to the guided reading or shared reading.  The other students can also read appropriate books for their reading level.  So often, we spend so much time trying to find activities for students to complete during guided reading that we make it more complicated than necessary.  Too many activities can sometimes cause behavior management problems.  I think personally this has been my issue in class.  I would have student rotating through a schedule and all of the commotion would cause students to get unfocused and off task.  From this point on, I am going to make sure the students not in my small group are working on activities with a true reading focus.  One very interesting thing I found while reading this chapter is the information on groupings.  Routman suggests that groups in the intermediate elementary grades are not ability grouped, but interest grouped.  Routman says, “once a student is a competent reader, you don’t have to worry so much about exact levels,” which I’ve seen in my own classroom.   I have students that are reading on a late middle school to early high school levels.  I worried so much about these students finding books that would be interesting to them and on their level.  I had to learn that these students were going to read what they like and still do extremely well.  Even though this is the end of the school year, I immediately figured out some changes I could make to help my current students and future students.