Guided Reading- How it looks in Room 10 and a non-fiction freebie

Strap in for a long one!

I've had a few e-mails asking how I run guided reading during Daily Five so I took a bunch of pictures and *hopefully* this will give you a good peek into my guided reading time!

Here's my table where the magic happens! I LOVE my easel! My pensive lives in the middle of the table along with a large desk calendar, my teacher editions, and a caddy with lots of writing utensils.

Now that my students are comfortable with Daily Five and we've built our stamina up to 20 minutes, it is time for me to begin guided reading groups. During the first four weeks, while my students were learning how to do Daily Five, I met with individual students during that time to figure out how my groups should look.

This year, I will be running 5 groups. I have a small easel next to my guided reading table and each group *usually* has a chart or other paper where we record our learning or I write things that we will practice. I put a sticky note on the edge of each one with their "number" so I can quickly flip to the chart that I need.

This group is an on-level first grade group. We will be following the small group on-level lessons from the Treasures teacher edition. We will meet on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday.  This chart features our weekly phonics fluency automaticity words & sight words.  This pack is available at my Teacher's Notebook store for both Treasures users AND the file contains the same set of lists with the Treasures correlation removed for non-Treasures users!

This is an on-level 2nd grade group. We will also be following the small group lessons in Treasures. We use the leveled readers and will meet on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. My hope is that in a few weeks, this group can meet three days a week to allow me to meet with other groups more, do individual progress monitoring, and individual conferences.


Group 3 is a mix of 1st and 2nd graders who are beyond level. At this time, it is all boys who love non-fiction texts but don't quite understand how to use all of the text features. Our first study will be on non-fiction text features. Next week, we are working on identifying them, learning what they are, and then finding them in our own non-fiction books. I blew up pictures from a non-fiction book and we will be spending time studying these! We will meet on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

Group 4 is a group of all girls who are beyond level. I want to focus on voracious reading to help grow their vocabulary and expand their book selection. We are going to start with several author and genre studies- first up is Mercer Mayer! I am still working on the unit and can't wait to share it with them! Though the books we read will be easy for them, I think the lovable character will help them get excited about doing more author studies in the future. We'll be meeting on Tuesday and Thursday.

My last group is a mix of 1st and 2nd graders who are very good readers and just need to keep doing what they're doing! We will be doing "book clubs". Our first one is on a Magic Tree House book. We're going to start studying prairie life this week by reading other prairie books and articles. Then we'll start the book next week. We'll meet on Wednesday and Friday. These kiddos will have a lot of reading to do on their own so we can discuss and extend our comprehension during our guided reading time.  We also do The Chocolate Touch- which my kiddos love!

Here are my group lesson plans so you can see how I organize them. Hopefully my sentence fragments and little notes will be understandable! :) You can download a copy of this form as well as several others I've made for individual conferring on my class website here.

Behind my table I have these Sterlite containers (I love my containers!). Each group has a drawer where I store their books and materials for the upcoming week. Any worksheets or workbook pages we will need are copied or ripped out and put into the folder inside the drawers.

I think that's it! Feel free to shoot me questions, but hopefully that was a little helpful!

You can click the graphic below to download some non-fiction features cards that my group 3 will be using this week to label text features! If you find them useful or my post, I'd love to hear from you in the comments! :)