Upper grade guided reading

When I recently visited Red Lion and York schools in Pennsylvania,  I worked with upper grade teachers on guided reading. I modeled how to plan and teach guided reading lessons in many classrooms. What a great week it was! One question that often comes up is, “What texts should we use in guided reading in grades 3-6?”

Here are some of the kinds of texts I’ve used (be sure what you choose is on the instructional reading level of the children you’ll work with):

 

• news magazine articles, such as National Geographic, Time for Kids, and Scholastic News
• little books for guided reading from publishers such as Mondo, Benchmark Education, ETA Cuisenaire, Pacific Learning, and Okapi
• leveled books that come with your core program
• trade books
• texts from the Comprehension Toolkit by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis
• short stories (see Janet Allen’s Read Aloud Anthology from Scholastic)
• ballads or song lyrics
• newspaper articles
• informational text cut and pasted from the Internet
• the first few chapters of a novel

I recommend you work together as a grade level team and/or across grade levels to build up files of resources you can use for guided reading with older students. The key is SHORT text. And something your students will be interested in.

 

Please let me know what some of your favorite resources are for guided reading in upper grades.

 

National Geographic Explorer- the Pathfinder edition is written for grades 4-5 and Pioneer is for grades 2-3

Leveled readers from a core reading program for grade 4

National Geographic Extreme Explorer is for struggling readers in grades 6-12

Time for Kids Exploring Nonfiction has cards in a set. There are two cards whose pictures look the same. One is written on-grade level, and the other is below-grade level. Sets are available for each grade level, K-8.

Guided reading book from Mondo

Trade books can be used for upper grade guided reading, too

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