Guided Reading Practice Adjustments

 Adjusting My Guided Reading Practice

Using the Framework for Guided Reading (The Fountas & Pinnell Literacy Continuum), I made a couple of adjustments to my Guided Reading sessions. 

Introduction to Text - Enable students to hear and sometimes say new language structures. 

Prior to reading with me, I got ākonga to listen to and read a long with three different texts that they accessed through their group task boards on our hub site. Once they had done this, they selected one to work with for the week. The texts were all Tongan Language based texts. (I usually do language weeks for more than one week). 

The text contained different Tongan words and names. The language structures I was focusing on were phonology and context. I was also looking at Tongan words and how these would be pronounced, using our prior knowledge of Pacific language vowel sounds. 

Ākonga got to listen by the audio on their taskboard, hearing each other read and us going over the sounds and settings of the text. 

Discussing the Text - Help students learn to discuss the meaning of the text together. 

My co-teacher had given me a set of cards for extending learning discussions which I managed to use with one group so far. These had different roles with a list of possible sentence and question starters. 

Once we had reminded ourselves about the Ground Rules for Talk, I posed a provocation based on the text, The Sons of Ma'afu. The statement was, that stories should only be told if they are based on real people and observed events. 

Ākonga had some thinking time and we started with the initiator posing a question. At first, it was interesting to see that responses initially had ākonga looking at me. I redirected them and said for them to discuss with each other, rather than me. 

I had no idea about how they would go, but they really liked it and started to get into the swing of things. This particular group were all keen to use the discussion cards again, so we will.

When our session was done, we went through the Ground Rules For Talk Reflection Chart to look at how we did as a group. 

One thing I loved about this discussion, was when one student gave her opinion and related things to her own culture and the importance of stories. Soon after, another student started by saying, 'I agree with what Melissa said because...'. She went on to share about the connections between their two cultures. I loved it and am excited about this element being brought into my reading programme. 

My next step is to work out, how I am going to fit Structured Literacy and other Literacy components into our timetable and ensuring that I have adequate coverage.