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1/ No, I do not want Guided Reading to occur in my child's classroom. GR was created by Fountas & Pinnell -- it includes leveled texts, which are predictable in the beginning (Kinder) levels.
2/ These texts include words that kids haven't been taught the code for, so they are instead front-loaded names, places, & instructed to use context clues and pictures to guess other words...
3/ Words like house, cow, horse, firefighter, police, turtle contain complex phonics patterns & vowel teams when kids are still learning consonants & short vowels.
4/ There is an overemphasis on "sight words" bc there has to be - the rest of the words in the early books are almost entirely made of them.
5/ Instead, if kids were taught the code explicitly, they could practice in books that supported the skills they were learning & be taught high frequency words in ways that align with what we know about how the brain learns to read.
6/ Many hfw are regular and can be learned like any other word - by decoding. Check out one of these videos for a good example of an irregular hfw introduction: reallygreatreading.com/heart-word-mag…
7/ My child will be fine -- he learned to read at 3. I hope his teacher will be wise enough to use actual books to teach him new concepts because he will already know how to decode.
8/ I'm concerned about the children for whom reading isn't easy, or who don't have parents who study reading and education for a living. They will be inculcated to believe reading should automatic - if you don't know the word by sight, use the first letter and picture to guess.
9/ They will feel like failures when they can't read and their peers can.
10/ They won't read as widely bc they haven't been taught how & will be pulled for intervention, missing content areas & losing ground on background knowledge & vocab, placing them further behind in knowledge & reading comprehension in later grades.
11/ Some will even get identified with a learning disability which good instruction and early intervention could have prevented. So, no, I don't want GR to occur in my child's classroom.
12/ I hope I can play a role in building teacher knowledge and practice so small group reading instruction is aligned with scientific evidence instead of disproven theories of how kids learn to read.
