Guided Reading Strategies for First Grade
Students learn many skills and concepts in first grade, and one of the hardest is reading. Guided reading allows teachers to work with students in small groups to practice strategies that build youngsters' reading abilities. According to "Right Tracking," guided reading helps students improve vocabulary, comprehension and fluency.
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Word Attack Skills
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First graders usually know their letters and sounds when they begin the school year, but some need word attack strategies to help them become strong readers. During guided reading, use this time to focus on sounding out words if that's what students need. Before students can read sentences, they must sound out words. Smaller words usually aren't challenging but words with four or more letters are. Teach students to look for smaller words inside of bigger words to sound out the word. Also teach students to look for a root word when decoding words with a suffix.
Comprehension Skills
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Teachers often notice weaknesses in comprehension during guided reading. Address comprehension problems by teaching students to think about what they are reading. If a student thinks about what he is saying, he will notice if he reads a sentence that doesn't make sense. Teach students that some answers are found directly in the story by looking for them, and use pictures to help them comprehend what's happening in the story. For responses that require students to draw conclusions, model the thought process for students. Walk them through the mental process of going through events in a story that help arrive at a conclusion when the information is not explicitly stated.
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Fluency
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Sometimes emergent readers sound choppy when they read out loud, but guided reading groups give students the chance to develop fluency. Tell students that reading should sound natural, as if they were talking to a friend. Teach students to read sentences with a pace that's not too fast or too slow. Also discuss reading with expression and instruct students to pause when they see a comma in a sentence, take a breath when a sentence ends with a period, and raise their voice at the end of a sentence when it ends with a question mark. Also allow students to re-read books they have already read. Research from "Reading Rocket's" website indicates that reading a book more than once is a strategy teachers can use to improve fluency.
Non-fiction vs. Fiction
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When beginning guided reading groups, start with fiction books. As students become better readers and decode text easier, move to non-fiction. Often, students comprehend fiction easier because the words are not as hard and there are fewer vocabulary words for them to learn. Also, there are pictures to support the text. When introducing non-fiction books, teach students about the characteristics of the book and how those characteristics help them to comprehend what they're reading.
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References
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