Chapter 3- Guided Reading Book Study!

Hi guys!!
I hope you had a great 4th of July and I hope you enjoyed Kinderland's freebie hop!
It was a lot of fun for us and it's awesome to know that so many teachers got so many great freebies to add to their collections!!

I'm a few days late (due to the great family time I was having over the 4th of July weekend) but I'm here today to recap chapter four of the Guided Reading book study that I've been doing!
Chapter 3 was huge!!
Not only was there a lot of great content, it was basically the first steps in getting started! 
This chapter was all about the Pre-A and emergent readers.  
(For this post, I will focus many on Pre-A since that is mostly what I will deal with for so much of the year in my classroom!)

Teaching Kindergarten, these two types of readers are what I deal with the most.  I was glad to get some great pointers on new things to try with them, new ways to think about things, and validation on some things that I'm already doing in my classroom.

This chapter made my highlighter go crazy!  I seriously had to stop myself at some points thinking I was highlighting almost every other sentence!!!  

The first thing that caught my eye was that the author specifically spells out that there are 4 components to this framework.  And under each component, she gives great ideas on different activities to have students do to help with each area.  Here are the four components and some activity ideas:
  1. Working with letters and names-  Trace and alphabet book (everyday), name puzzles, making name with magnetic letters, rainbow writing, matching letters from a bag, matching upper and lower case letters, name letters left to right, match letters to an alphabet chart, and naming the letter that begins with that word.  
  2. Working with sounds-  Clapping syllables, working with rhymes and picture sorts.
  3. Working with books-  The teacher should first guide the student though the book and have them take turns discussing the pictures.  You should avoid asking questions that get a one word answer but instead, ask more open-ended questions.  Next, the teacher should read the book with the students in a coral reading session. The student should have some kind of pointer so they can point as they go along.  Lastly, students can read it independently.        
  4. Interactive writing-  Dictate simple 4-6 word sentences for the students to write.  The teacher will use a sentence strip and draw a line for each word in the sentence.  Have students take turns writing each word.  The students not writing on the strip will be practicing the letter on the alphabet chart in front of them!  In this section, cut-up sentences is also a good activity for students to do.  They simply but words in a correct order to make a complete sentence with punctuation! 
For the beginning of the year, I will be sure to have all of my name and letter activities up and going! I think that is something that we can hit on starting the first or second week of school!  I have tons of letter magnets and letter cards!
 I will need to make sure that I have cute, simple and non-distracting alphabet charts for my kiddos.  I will make sure they match the big alphabet cards I will put up in my classroom, that way they are familiar with the pictures and font! Something like this is cute but simple all at the same time!

Like the other chapters so far, the author gives you tons of great charts and forms so that you may keep records of student placement and progress.  This is very helpful in that you don't have to reinvent the wheel!  The charts and done and ready to be copied to use!!!

At the end of this chapter, the author includes many great 'commonly asked questions' and their answers!  Many of them were questions that were already swirling around in my head!! 

Be sure to join me and the Freebielicious girls later in the week for chapter 4 of this great book!

2 comments

  1. Great post! I'm going to have a lot of students who don't know the alphabet this year, so I'm loving this book study! Thanks for sharing!!
    Pam
    http://mrspspecialties.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete

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