In Year 2, Guided Reading is taught as a standalone lesson each week. Taught in leveled classes, it is an important subject which has the aim of developing students into knowledgeable, efficient readers. Teachers also employ Guided Reading methodology when reading 1 to 1 with their students each week.
How is Guided Reading taught?
What is the difference between Phonics and Guided Reading?
To contrast these two subjects, Phonics is the learning of letters/letter combinations and their corresponding sounds. The emphasis in Phonics is to allow students to make these connections as well as familiarise them with the tricky orthography system of English. For example, a student who has completed the Phonics programme at the end of Year 2 may be able to read a medical text or computer manual perfectly, though they are unlikely to understand what they are reading. This is where Guided Reading comes in. Guided Reading lessons are designed to encourage and develop reading skills like comprehension, sequencing, inference, detail retrieval, summarisation, and vocabulary definition. Guided Reading also helps to develop Higer Order Thinking skills such as comparing, contrasting, evaluating, and interpreting.
Assessment
It is important to add that our assessment criteria are heavily biased (and rightly so) towards the above Guided Reading skills. Students must show comprehension of a text in order to move up to a new book level. Being able to read a text out loud perfectly but with no evidence of understanding is not considered a successful completion of a given book level.
How can parents support their children at home?
There are some excellent websites that can guide parents on how to support students at home. The below website provides a good summary on how to use questioning in order to develop the child’s comprehension as well as familiarising them with the style of assessment questioning that they will be faced with all the way up to Year 6.
A useful website all about GR: https://hollymount.org/Parents_pages_/Reading_with_your_children_/Guided_Reading_Workshop_for_Parents.pdf
A note about Bug Club
In Year 2, every child has a Bug Club account that allows them access to many kinds of books throughout the year. These are books that are specifically leveled to each student’s reading level and has questioning built into each book. The style and nature of the questions are very similar to those on our assessments and are designed to exercise the reading skills that students practise at school. Many schools are not lucky enough to have Bug Club due to the cost and time associated with managing the platform (teachers must manually keep on top of replenishing students’ books and changing levels when necessary). For this reason, I would strongly recommend that parents and students take advantage of this platform at home, and if there are concerns about screentime, I would recommend limiting use for 10 minutes a day or to whatever amount of time that you, as a parent, feel comfortable with. If you are against the use of reading on devices altogether, then I would encourage you to take a look at some online resources so that you are well prepared to support with Guided Reading using traditional paper books. You can find many printable bookmarks online that have questioning ideas for different reading skills, and these are easy to just pull out when reading with your child in order to guide you.
By James Behzadi
Year 2 Giraffes Class Teacher
