How Guided Reading Activities Can Help Students
How Guided Reading Activities Can Help Students
Ask a kindergarten teacher about how her class reads and she is bound to tell you that the hardest part is keeping each and every student challenged as they have their own ability levels. This holds true in kindergarten the most because children come from varying backgrounds. Some may have never gone to preschool in their lives but others may be coming from a highly specialized Montessori style education. Some may not even know their alphabet correctly whereas others are fluently reading first grade level books.
Level Readers
This is where guided reading activities can help. Guided reading activities are available in a variety of forms such as level readers. Here the teacher introduces a theme or story to the entire class. Then children of similar ability levels are given books about that theme to read. The teacher monitors how they are doing and guides their reading with activities and questions. Once the children are done, they discuss the story and each can answer according to the level he has been reading at.
This way, for instance, they all read about a day at the farm, but the rookie readers are not stressed with very high vocabulary nor the mature readers feel bored with easy words. They can all actively participate in such guided reading activities and put in their two cents worth at the end of the day.
Visual Cues
Another guided reading activity is to use pictorial representations of the content being read. Teachers can explain to older children how they can use flow charts, bubbles, timelines etc to visually remind themselves of what they have just read. It is easier to remember a picture, especially if you have made it yourself than a bunch of words written by someone else. By recollecting a bar graph or a bubble cartoon of the science experiment they just read about, students may be able to absorb it better than by reading and re-reading pages upon pages about it.
Make it Interactive
Another facet to guided reading activities is to make the reading session interactive and to continue asking questions. Ask the children to predict what will happen next. Ask them to find a similarity between this page and a previous one? Ask them if anyone of them as experienced a similar event. So even if they do not relate with the fictional characters, they may remember a story their best friend tells the class.