Guided Reading Books

We are often asked how we use the books in our leveled book room.  The way we have used wonderful book room resources has evolved over the years. We used to go in each Monday, pull sets of 6 books that would match the level of the readers in our small groups and read through them together as part of our guided reading instruction. What we realized was that grouping students by reading level was failing to meet their very diverse reading needs. They were reading at the same level but needed different strategy work in order to meet goals related to comprehension, accuracy, fluency or expanded vocabulary. So now, we might group students by level, but only if they are working on the same strategy. Often this is our youngest learners who are just cracking the code of reading. They need to have the experience of how to tackle a book, ie: predicting by looking at the cover and title, taking a book walk, etc. and guiding them through this process can be expedited by placing them together in a group. On the flip side, we've found that strategy work is just as effective, if not more so, if students just bring their own good fit books to the group. So, back to your question. What about those books? We use them in a couple of ways.

1. We always have a tub or basket containing single copies of books that we have pulled from the book room. These books are leveled in our basket from easy to harder levels. That way, when we meet with and individual or group of students who are reading on different levels but working with the same strategy and they need a fresh text to read from, we have a selection right at our fingertips to provide for that immediate guided practice of the strategy.
2. We are finding that the books in the bookrooms ranging from the very beginning level up until about a mid-second grade reading level are used all the time. It can be hard to find books at the very beginning reading level for students to choose from in order to receive and practice strategy instruction. However, once children become a bit more proficient readers, they are not interested in reading books from book rooms in which the text may be contrived or the higher level books may look like those they read in K and 1st grade. In that case, pulling those books out of the book room and rearranging them into themes, in particular science and social study themes and then having the themed tubs available for teachers to check out is a wonderful way to make great use of these resources!