My Small Groups Are Set, Now What?

So now I have my small groups, so what do you do next you ask? Well that depends on the groups that you have created. As a teacher of 17 years, I have come to realize that the resources I use to prepare are important. Let me say that these are things that I as a teacher have found great resources to use to prepare for my small group instruction.

Guided Reading groups:

If I am teaching guided reading groups that are based on reading levels, the first thing I do is make sure that I am familiar with what each reader is expected to be able to do in order to process the text in which they are reading. I do this by studying the Reading Bands. The reading bands tell you what kids should be able to do in the level they are in and what they need to be able to do to move to the next level. I created a flip book of these bands and highlighted criteria that is important for readers to be successful. If you notice kids are not performing according to what the band states, I personally go back and look at the previous bands and see what the student is missing.

So once all this is accomplished book choice is important.  You want to try to rotate books in my opinion, start with a book that is too easy to work on fluency and decoding strategies, and then use their instructional level to teach skills necessary for students to be able to talk about the book, make inferences beyond the book, and be able to interact with the book. As a teacher,  I learned after the first few years to focus on one of those three areas not all of them. I also realized that you want to keep these groups as small as possible (3 to 6 students). However, six is a bit much to handle when you are trying to make sure to address individuals within a given time frame. This differs from teacher to teacher, school to school and even district to district. So once I determine which area to focus on, number of students, then use the Bands to determine which skill or strategy to focus on in that group for the day.

Here is an example of how you can set up or organize for guided reading groups:

Strategy Groups:

If I am teaching strategy groups, I can mix up reading levels and group kids according to need and each kid can use their own leveled book to practice and apply strategy.  That's what I love about small group teaching. I then make sure I have the necessary materials, things that I like to have readily available: small student dry erase boards, erasers, dry erase markers, index cards, sticky notes, magnetic letters, highlighters, pencils, paper, along with various charts: ABC,  Blends, Dipthongs, poems, an easel, chart paper, and whisper phones.

I often use poems as a Read Aloud during the lesson because they are short and you can find many that address a lot of the common word patterns that students struggle with during their independent reading. I make sure to have student books that represent the skill I am trying to teach as well to do a guided practice with students. Students are then expected to do the same with words that are in their individual books that are pre-selected by the teacher and represent the errors that this particular group of students are making.

Below is an example that is similar to one of the ways that I organized my word work materials when I taught Second grade, but now that I teach Fourth grade I create my buckets daily because the materials change daily.  This is just the way I did it.  So think about ways to organize your materials for your students to not only access during small group or when working independently as well.  

So, these are things that I would do as a reading teacher once I establish my small reading groups, whether Strategy or Guided. So, what's next? Well, how about some book talks, my perspective on some of the most effective professional development reading materials that help me enhance myself as a reading teacher.