Shared and Guided Reading

Routman Chapters 9 & 10
What are the key differences and similarities between shared and guided reading? What elements of shared or guided reading have you observed in your placement?

Shared reading is more of a whole-class activity where guided reading is a small-group activity. Shared reading is a way to get all students involved and give all students a chance to be successful in reading. In shared reading, students follow along as the teacher reads either out loud or silently; they turn-and-talk to their neighbors to answer questions about the story. I think the most important part of shared reading is that students of any reading ability can participate and be successful.

Guided reading is more for teaching specific reading strategies to small groups of students who need it. Students will read passages from books silently (mostly) then talk to each other about what happened. The teacher is there to guide the conversation towards the reading strategies that are appropriate for that group of students. Guided reading is also a time for the teacher to observe how students are reading and what they may need next to help them be better readers.

Word Identification

Fox Chapter 2:
Isolating Sounds: Activity 2.22 Picture-Sound-Letter Sort
*The focus of this activity is to sort pictures according to their shared beginning sounds and identify the letter that makes that sound.
*Hold up a picture and ask children to say the just the beginning sound. Talk about the letter that represents that sound and look for other words in the room that share the same beginning sound. Have one child glue the picture into the correct column on a piece of chart paper. Write the letter of the beginning sound next to the picture.
*My assessment for this activity would be to call on each student during the group activity and make sure they are able to put the picture in the correct column. Another option would be to continue the lesson and have students do their own word sorts. In these word sorts I would also be looking for correct placement of pictures in their corresponding columns.


Isolating Sounds Activity 2.34 I Spy (I like this option because it is something that can be used as a filler if there is extra time!)
*The focus of this activity is to check for students' understanding of beginning sounds by looking for objects in the classroom with a specific beginning sound.
*"I spy something that begins with ____" Students must guess the exact object the teacher is thinking of by using the beginning sound of the object as a clue.
*Assessment for this activity is to listen for the students' guesses of objects that match the beginning sounds the teacher has specified. It's a nice bonus if they can guess the exact object :)


Fox Chapter 3:
I can see both sides of the invented spelling dilemma... It is great to encourage students to use what they know about sound-letter relationships to guess how spell a word. However, I can see a potential problem when students are guessing at blends or some long vowel sounds. For example, an invented spelling for boat may very be bot. Continuing to spell boat that way could potentially lead the child astray and they may never fully understand the oa spelling of the long o sound since they have already come to their own understanding of how to spell boat. Their own long o rule could be generalized to other words with the same long o sound. Invented spelling can only be allowed for so long. Maybe one solution could be to add the conventionally spelled words to the word wall every time you see an invented spelling that could lead to a misconception.