Students, please take out your text books...

Shared reading and guided reading are two wonderful, yet very different teaching styles. I think that as a teacher the goal is to blend these two styles into your daily classroom routine as much as possible.

Shared reading is a great way to introduce students to a new genre. Last week in my main placement, my MT was introducing our students to Non-Fiction books. She used the document-camera to display the book on the screen for the class to see and read along. We have many ELL students in our class, so it was important for her to pick a text that was not too dificult. The lesson was focusing on the "features of non-fiction", not so much the information within the text. Under the docu-cam she displayed the full spread of the text, pointing out how the pictures are photographs, not drawings. She used "cognitive-apprenticeship" to "think out loud" while she read through the text and discovered that the photographs had "words under them that talk about the picture." She told the students that "readers call these words 'captions'."

Guided reading is equally as important, although much harder to execute in a classroom. My MT will sometimes have me work with a small reading group of similar level readers, but I find that there is little 'extra' time during the day to incorportate specialized reading groups. This is very unfortunate becuase students (especially the highest performers and lowest performers) gain SO much small group teaching. I think that it is mostly a classroom management issue, and like Routman explains, you have to let the class fend for itself unless it is an absolute emergency (which she has yet to see!). Yet, as a new teacher the idea of letting the students play "Lord of the Flies" for 20 minutes seems like a disaster waiting to happen. I have seen guided reading successfully executed in my Dyad placement. My teacher would set out the literacy centers once a week on Mondays. The centers rotated every 2 months and begin in October, so the excitement and level of engagement remains high among the kindergarteners. Students are assigned centers in pairs and the teacher is able to hold a meaningful conference with 4 to 5 students without interruption. She also requests parent volunteers to come in during this time, resulting in 2 Monday volunteers who are familar with the routine and extremely helpful.