Guided Reading

For my guided reading article, I chose a article on guided reading for deaf children and children with other diverse needs. This was very interesting to be because I am a future special education teacher. The article mentions that there is little research on programs to teach deaf children how to read. So the teachers in this school decided to incorporate a guided reading approach along with the already in place shared reading, independent reading, and teacher read alouds. 
 The teachers recognized that their students needed help in language, vocabulary, background knowledge, and word recognition skills. 

For the program assessment:
Students were given five sessions with one book that includes a before, during, and after reading activity. 
So for example, the students were given a book about a woman who sews a coat for her children. The children would first learn about sewing by possibly having someone come in who sews and sign about what she does or show examples. Next, the children will begin reading and teachers will walk around and do a picture walk with the children.  Vocabulary will be highlighted in this step. Then the students will discuss the vocabulary, the picture read, and predictions for what will happen next. The students will do more activities like this everyday until students have a significant background knowledge, new vocabulary words, and excitement for the book reading. Then the students will read the book themselves. After reading, the text will be discussed as a whole class.

Doing these activities for multiple books will teach the children how to follow these steps on their own and more productively so they can read many books on their own. The findings of the school study found that students saw a lot of improvement, and the schools are still implementing the guided reading approach today.