Presentation at Ascot Vale Special School

1. Guided Reading

2. “No student is too
anything to be
able to read
and write”
David Yoder, DJI-AbleNet
Literacy Lecture, ISAAC
2000

3. Our National Curriculum
“We need to give greater attention to the
general capabilities of Literacy as being
core to the learning needs of students with
significant intellectual disability and the
ways in which these can be taught through
age appropriate contexts drawn from the
learning areas ”
(ACARA, 2012)

4. Red light, Green light

5. Accommodating Struggles
physical demands
cognitive demands
sensory demands
communication demands
experience demands
affect demands

6. Conventional Literacy

7. Silent Reading Comprehension
Word Language
Identification Comprehension
Print Processing
Beyond Word Identification
(Slide from Erickson and Koppenhaver, 2010)

8. Beginning To Read
Phonological awareness, letter recognition
facility, familiarity with spelling patterns,
spelling-sound relations, and individual
words must be developed in concert with
read reading and real writing and with
deliberate reflection on the forms,
functions, and meanings of texts.
(Adams, 1990)

9. Literacy Instruction
Phonics
Balanced
Literacy
Instruction
Whole
Language

10. Balanced Literacy Instruction
• Uses all valid parts of literacy instruction –
not one approach;
• Works for students all along the literacy
continuum – from emergent to formal;
• Four Blocks is balanced literacy
instruction.

11. Four Blocks

12. Four Blocks
• Created by Patricia Cunningham and
Dorothy Hall;
• www.fourblocks.com;
• Four Blocks in Special Ed wiki
https://fourblock.wikispaces.com/.

13. Four Blocks
• Centre for Literacy and Disability Studies,
North Carolina
http://www.med.unc.edu/ahs/clds;
• Big thank-you to them for teaching me
about Four Blocks, sharing their resources
and being awesome!
• Have a good look at their resources
section.

14. Guided Reading
• Primary purposes are to assist students to:
– Understand that reading involves thinking and
meaning-making;
– Become more strategic in their own reading.
• Must use a wide variety of books and
other print materials.

15. Self-Selected Reading
• Primary purposes are to assist students to:
– Understand why they might want to learn;
– Become automatic in skill application;
– Choose to read after they learn how.
• It isn’t self-directed if you don’t choose it
yourself;
• You can’t get good at it if it is too difficult.

16. Writing
• Students who write become better
readers, writers and thinkers;
• Learning in classroom writing
communities:
– Write for real reasons;
– See others do so;
– Interact with peers and teacher about written
content, use and form.

17. Working with Words
• Primary purpose is to help students become
strategic in reading words;
• Make words instruction:
– Words based;
– Experience based;
– Age appropriate;
• Should results in students who read and
write:
– More;
– More successfully and independently;
– With greater enjoyment.

18. If All Children Are To
Learn, All Teachers
Must Teach
Everything
(Koppenhaver, Erickson & Clendon,
2008)

19. Technology To Support the Four
Blocks

20. But remember.....
ICT = It Can’t
Teach

21. Guided Reading

22. Guided Reading
• Help students to understand that:
– Reading involves thinking and meaning making;
– They can use a range of strategies in their
reading to collect information, understand text,
etc.
• Must use a wide variety of books and other
print materials:
– Commercial books;
– Personal experience books;
– Custom books.
• NOT listening comprehension.

23. Purposes for Reading
• Need to set a purpose every time you do
guided reading;
• If you don’t set a purpose students think
they have to remember everything – or
become passive;
• Purpose needs to be broad enough to
motivate processing of entire text.

24. Purposes for Reading
• Developing readers have not learned to
set their own purposes for reading.
• If a purpose is not set, the implied purpose
is:
– Read this to remember everything
– Read this to guess what I am going to ask you
• Purpose should be broad enough to
motivate processing of entire text:
– Yes: Read to make up a new title for this story
– No: Read to tell me where the story takes
place

25. 3 Characteristics of Good
Purposes:
“Read so that you can...”
• Requires processing of entire text, at least
initially:
– Yes: tell in 10 words or less what this story is
about
– No: tell where the hero lived
• Requires search for main idea:
– Yes: tell how you think the story will end
– No: tell which words on pg7 have a short /i/ sound
• Helps the reader focus attention:
– Yes: tell which of these adjectives describe the
boy and which describe the girl in the story
– No: answer the questions at the end of the

26. Guided Reading
• 1 book per week;
• Different purpose each day;
• Build confidence;
• Some students will participate in the
repeated readings or in setting purposes
as they become more skilled;
• Help students become independent.

27. Types of Guided Reading
• Picture walk;
• Before-During-After (Three Part);
• Directed Reading-Thinking Activity;
• KWL (What do I Know, what do I Want to
know, what have I Learned).

28. Guided Reading Follow-Ups
• Action purposes – Reader’s Theatre,
Drawing, etc;
• Linguistic purposes – sentence ordering,
word ordering, write our own version.

29. Picture Walk
• Walk students through the book and get
them to guess the content;
• They can use any strategy:
– Prior knowledge;
– Knowledge of text structures;
– Some word knowledge;
– Picture as supports.

31. 5 part Guided Reading
• Before reading:
1. Build or activate background knowledge
2. Purpose “Read so that you can”
• During reading:
3. Read/listen
• After reading:
4. Task directly related to the purpose
5. Feedback/Discussion (typically woven into follow-up)
• What makes you say that? How do you know? Why do you
think so?
• Help students gain cognitive clarity so they can be successful
again or next time

32. Cock-A-Moo-Moo
1. Read to learn which animal in the book is
your favourite (before reading, list the
animals in the book)

34. #1 - Read to learn which animal in
the book is your favourite

35. Participation for students with
CCN
• If they have a comprehensive
communication system (egg PODD) then
they can use that to participate across the
day;
• If they don’t then we need to provide ways
for them to participate;
• AND we need to work towards getting
them a comprehensive communication
system.

36. Cock-A-Moo-Moo Purposes
1. Read to learn which animal in the book is your
favourite (before reading, list the animals in the
book)
2. Read to see what is the funniest sound the
rooster makes (before reading, list the sounds
the rooster makes)
3. Read to decide which feelings the rooster has
(before reading, list some feelings you know)
4. Read to discuss why the fox was sneaking in
(before reading discuss reasons he might sneak
into a barn)
5. Read to see which farm animals aren’t in the
book (before reading list the farm animals you

37. #2 - Read to see what is the
funniest sound the rooster makes

38. #3 - Read to decide which feelings
the rooster has

39. #4 - Read to discuss why the fox
was sneaking in

40. #5 - Read to see which farm
animals aren’t in the book

41. Repetition with Variety
To learn a skill and generalise it across
contexts, instruction must provide
repetition of the skills in a variety of ways

42. Variety
• Variety of purposes;
• Variety of approaches;
• Variety of texts;

43. Directed Reading-Thinking Activity
DR-TA (Stauffer)
• Students LOOK at title or pictures and
predict story;
• Students READ to a predetermined
stopping point;
• Students PROVE the accuracy of their
predictions and modify them or make new
predictions.

45. What do you think is going to happen in this
story? Let’s have a look at the first few
pictures and see what you think.

50. What do you think is going to happen in this
story?

51. Check Predictions
Changes?
Deletions?
Additions?

52. How did your predictions match the
text?

53. KWL (Ogle, 1986)
• Know – what do I know?
– Identify key concept in text and ask students
to tell you what they know about it
• Want – what do I want to know?
• Learn – what have I learned?

54. Kolah the Koala
Jon Resnick and Jan Davis

55. Variety of texts
• Commercial books;
• Fiction and non-fiction;
• Language Experience/custom texts;
• Created texts about class/individual
experiences;
• Personal alphabet books;
• TarHeel Reader books.

56. What does Emma do?
by Mr Clark

57. Mr. Potato-head's Big
Adventure!
by Hgiunta

59. Guided Reading Books
• Those you already have (class and
library);
• Information from the www;
• Created books on topics of interest in
PowerPoint, Clicker 5, Boardmaker Studio;
• TarHeel Reader;
• Start-to-Finish books.

60. Picture, Symbols and Text
• Symbols appear to improve access to
literacy..... But do they really?

63. Why no picture-supported text
when teaching reading?
• Pictographs can be distracting for developing
readers who may pay more attention to the
pictures than the text they are learning to
read/decode
• After a review of literature Hatch (2009) found “the
outcomes of several research studies that
investigated the use of pictures to support the
development of word identification in readers with
and without disabilities indicated that children
learned more words in fewer trials when words
were presented alone than when paired with
pictures (Pufpaff, Blischak & Lloyd, 2000;
Samuels, 1967; Samuels et al, 1974)

64. Why are pictographs
distracting?
• Symbols representing function words are
typically opaque and unrelated to the
meaning of the text.
• The lack of consistency of symbols and
symbol-sets used to represent words across
AAC user’s learning environments, and;
• The multiple symbolic representations and
meanings for single written words e.g. play.

65. When should we use symbols?
• To support COMMUNICATION
– All day, every day
– During reading instruction
– During writing instruction
• To support behaviour and self-regulation
– Visual supports
– Visual schedules