Guided Reading in April--Reading & Vocabulary Strategies

Hello, Kinder Tribe! I am Breanna from A Pinch of Primary. I am so excited to be posting all about one of the biggest parts of our day--the literacy block. My school uses the Fountas & Pinnell literacy foundation and I just L-O-V-E it. Guided reading fits perfectly with our F&P resources and The Daily 5 model we use! If you're looking for a fabulous guided reading resource, Jan Richardson's book is like the HOLY GRAIL for guided reading lessons and ideas. Seriously, we swear by it in my corporation. I love that I can look at the time of year in the book and see exactly where they need to be, what we need to be working on, and how to give the extra boost to those low, average, and higher kiddos.

At this point in the school year, and with the way our kindergarten assessing schedule works, we finished up 'official' guided reading groups last week. I know, I know...This is sounds HORRIBLE and every other possible synonym for horrible, but we have a lot going on in the next 28 days before school is out. Yes, 28 days! YIKES! Where does the time go with our little kinder babies?! We have end-of-year benchmarking to do, our mile-long list of quarterly assessments to give, and we give the Observation Survey a second time to see how much they have grown (this is our K-screening method and is a time consuming task, but contains extremely useful data). We still do unofficial reading groups to push those little ones that need the extra little boost and we continue to work with the kids that need that enrichment to continue growing as a reader. In those 'unofficial', in-between-testing reading groups, I work a lot on fluency strips, comprehension passages, and, my favorite, reading/vocabulary strategies.

To start the year and my reading groups, I use the animals to introduce reading and vocabulary strategies. Here is a glimpse at the reading strategies in my classroom:

You can grab these posters in my TpT store here.

These posters have been so beneficial to my students. Even my little ones who are constantly needing those reminders to get their lips ready or use your eagle eyes, they always remember the picture. I have even heard them telling their elbow buddy to use the strategies to sound out a word they are unsure of. (#HappyTeacherMoment) Not only are these strategies fabulous to use during reading, they are also extremely helpful when sounding out more difficult words during vocabulary time. In our F&P series, we use sound boxes to segment sounds, chunks, blends, etc. This is one of my students' favorite parts of the group time. We have our challenge words or words found in our books during our group time that they are to sound out, but the sound boxes work from the beginning of the year in K all the way through first grade! These resources are so connected because I hear myself saying get your mouth ready to know which sound to write, use stretchy the snake to stretch those words out, find chunks you know, etc. There are so many options! Here is a picture of the sound boxes I created to use with my kinders:

They are nothing fancy in my room. They are laminated to use for dry erase markers, but putting them in pocket pals would be just as easy!  Click here for a FREEBIE of my BOOMIN' sound boxes! I just love how these work from August to end of kindergarten and beyond! Consistency in a reading routine is just as important as the physical procedures we practice each and every day--even when the craziness of April and May ensues! :) 

What guided reading resources or tools can you use from start to finish in your classroom?

~Breanna