How to Setup and Run Guided Reading Groups in a Special Education Classroom

Okay, here we go. Happy Tuesday. Tonight I am doing a very specific live, not an open Q&A, which I've done a lot of those. I am going to be doing some more live Facebook Lives on a specific topic, and tonight our first one is how to run guided reading groups. So I really love doing Facebook Lives, but I want to get a little bit more specific with what I'm doing the live on, so I thought about about some topics I get asked a lot by people and what would be kind of a good topic to start this out with. And I think guided reading is a perfect one because it's something that I think can be set up in so many classrooms, but sometimes we get a little bit unsure of. So if you have any suggestions for future Facebook Live topics, so something that's a little more specific, I'm kind of thinking like a blog post but a little bit more in depth. So if you have questions, you can just ask me right away. And it'll be a little bit more interactive than just reading a blog post or listening to a podcast. So if you have any suggestions, feel free to throw them in here. Feel free to message me later. No worries. Um, so yeah, I have a few other ideas coming up and I'm going to try to do this a little more regularly. And yeah, so let's get rolling. So if you have any questions as we're going through, I will try to get them answered. I want to share a lot of simple solutions for some of the problems and obstacles for guided reading. And I really, really wanna break this down into a step-by-step process because that's how I learn and that's how I can follow through on things is when I have a plan. So I really wanna start this out kind of in a strategic way, but let's give this a little context first. So my early years teaching, I really didn't have that many kids that were readers yet. Yet. And I was an early teacher, so I had no idea how to teach them reading. I really, really struggled with the best ways to get literacy going. And then as I got a little bit more comfortable and had a little bit more experience on the best ways to teach reading, my class kind of had really shifted on the skill set, and I didn't have that many readers. That was a struggle. I had a lot of kids that were working on those foundational skills, but I didn't feel like I had enough kids to do guided reading, which I was wrong, but, you know, hindsight, right? And then once I got more kids that were all readers and on similar levels, at first I thought initially it would just kind of come right together, and there were some things that I started to realize when working with those groups that you really wanted to be specific on the way you set things up, and that the way that my colleagues down the hall in a gen ed class set up their guided reading groups how it worked for them didn't necessarily work for me, and there were other things that I had to take into account. So that was a great experience because I did have students that were really perfect for that setting, so it would, for that situation, so it allowed me to figure out what best practices to get started with them and then really work on it with other groups. So I'm gonna go through tonight what guided reading is, how to set it up, how to get groups going, how to establish your centers, so what other kids are doing, because that is really half the problem. And then we'll look at what are you actually doing in those 15 or 20 minutes with the kids, like what is that protocol? So let's start with what is guided reading? So guided reading is putting groups, students in groups with their students that are at, with their peers that are at the same reading level. So you're gonna be teaching students that are at the same reading level at the same time and targeting a specific skill in an individualized way at their instructional level. So not their frustration level, not their independent level, you're gonna take a lot of time to assess and find out what their reading level is. And then pairing them with students that are in the same, in a similar reading level as them. And then you wanna work on a specific skill related to that level. So there are a few mistakes that I made in my early implementation on guided reading that I will share in a few minutes because maybe they're making those mistakes too. And not that it has to always be done one way, but I realized that there were a lot of more effective things I could be doing. So the first thing, setting up your groups. So obviously you want to assess your readers and figure out where your students are. My advice here is to you, if you are in a gen ed building, is to use whatever systems your gen ed building uses. If your building uses Fountas and Pinnell, use Fountas and Pinnell. That's gonna help inclusion a lot, that's gonna help you be part of grade-level meetings, that is going to just make everything a little bit easier. Those, those resources are already in your building, so go with whatever your gen ed building uses. And start those, even if you haven't started your assessments yet, and that sometimes can take a little bit of time, even if it— you're like midway through the fall or midway through the year, get those assessments done. But even if you haven't had them done yet, you can still get your groups going. You can change your groups later. So put students that have similar language arts goals, that have similar literacy goals, that have similar— if you did the ABLES, have similar ABLES tasks. Just because your assessments aren't done, don't make this hold kind of this process up, because there's a lot of points in the process of setting up and running guided reading where you're like, oh, I can't do this, so I'm just going to stop. And that's really what I want to encourage you today, is not let the little things trip you up and kind of to just keep going, because you can always go back and change it. So use whatever reading assessment your, your school uses. I'm going to show a few little tracking template ideas that could be helpful. I like to keep track throughout the school year, but what can happen is you forget. You do your reading assessments in October, and then all of a sudden it's March and you haven't done them again. So put it in your, in your planner, put it in your lesson plans. I even like one like this where it's gonna have, you know, the kind of prompt for fall, winter, spring, and remind you when you need to go back and do that assessment again, so you're not like going half the year without updating your assessments. So group your students with similar levels for your pre-readers. So they're not reading yet. It's the key word, right? If you listen to my podcast on growth mindset, I'm all about that word yet. So some students might not be reading yet. That's okay. They can still be part of guided reading. You're gonna be working on the foundational skills they need to get to Level A. They're pre-A. If you're doing Fountas and Minell, they're not at A yet, cool. Let's work on letter ID. Let's work on sounds. Let's work on blends. Let's work on book awareness and book skills. Let's work on tracing and writing, all these great prerequisites. That's where the VB-MAPP and ABLES will become really powerful because they're gonna list out all those skills you need to get to that Level A. So your pre-readers can be part of this too, and you'll develop those groups in the same way you would for your readers. So again, that's not a stum— that's not an obstacle. The, "Oh, well, not all my kids are readers, I can't do this." You absolutely can. And the reason I'm super passionate about guided reading groups working so well in a self-contained classroom especially is when I talk about setting up groups and having students rotate between groups, that's how our classrooms are set up anyways. So we might as well incorporate this whole process and then get even better at it when it comes to our literacy instruction, because our literacy instruction is just essential to everything. So we want to put our group, our kids into groups with kids that are similar, because we're gonna be able to get a lot of bang for our buck. I would much rather have a 15-minute lesson that is individualized for that student that's at their level than a 60-minute lesson that is either way too hard or way too easy. Because when things are way too hard or way too easy, you're bored, 'cause it's not accessible. And when you're bored, what do you do? Off-task behaviors. We all do off-task behaviors when we're bored. Think about the last time you were at a long stoplight or a long train in your car. What did you do? You just sat there? No, you probably were watching Tasty videos and someone's Insta Stories, maybe mine, who knows, right? We engage in off-task behaviors when we're bored. So having those shorter lessons that are more appropriate for the students' level is gonna be really, really effective. So one question I get here, and pop in with any questions if you have them as I'm going, is what if I only have one student at a level, or even at a level nearby? Like let's say you have a a few students that are level C, and a few students that are level E, and then you have another student that's level M, and you're like, "Oh, what do I do with you? This is amazing that you're level M, but are you in a group by yourself?" So you wanna get creative here. Maybe you do want them in a group by yourself. Maybe you want to work with a Jenna teacher down the hall and say, "Hey, when does your level M guided reading group meet? Can Johnny come join?" Maybe you want to group him with, students that are a little bit lower or higher, but know that you're gonna have to differentiate to his instructional level if the gap is pretty big. So if you have one student a level, kind of deal with those kind of little tweaks as needed. So that's step 1, is you want to set up your groups and figure out who's going to go together and get that whole plan down. So step 2, then you need to establish your centers. So if your kid's only with you for 15 minutes, that means they're doing other stuff for the rest of this time period. What are they doing? You're not just gonna be like, hey, go chill over there for 45 minutes, I'll see you when I'm ready for you. That's not gonna fly. So you want to set up adult-directed and independent centers. And this is something that I see a lot of people freeze on, and I was totally someone that froze on this. If you watched my training series that I shared back in August, the third video, I talked about how I had that like not decision fatigue because I wasn't even making decisions. I was just frozen in decision-making mode because I wanted the centers to be perfect and I wanted the centers to be different and differentiate in this and I just, I had so much to do, I couldn't get it all done perfectly so I just didn't do it. Absolutely not. You want to go simple. The mantra here is Simple, simple, simple. So the centers that you are creating that are independent can be something as simple as quiet reading. It can be leisure time. It can be writing spelling words from the board. I'm gonna show a few quick examples. Where's my pile over here? Adult-directed centers. These are what your paraprofessionals are doing. These can be super simple too. So this one I really like. This is a weekly spelling words. This could be done by a paraprofessional. The student writes the words at the top of the page and then they have a little schedule for each day of the week. Monday, write the words 5 times. Tuesday, write a sentence. Wednesday, definitions. Thursday, quiz a friend. Friday, a spelling test. And then to plan your words, look what you got. You have your group, Joe, Josh, and Ashley. You pick their words for each week. Your month is planned. This is what you give to your staff. Here, here's your spelling center plans on 2 pieces of paper. Like it doesn't have to be groundbreaking, it doesn't have to be perfect, but this is gonna be differentiated, it's structured, it's planned out, it's gonna be effective. So it doesn't have to be something, I think, overly complicated. Let me give one more example of a good adult-directed one. Let's see. Oh, I like this journal one. Where do I have the journal one? Journal one actually I think can be a really good, A really good independent one, actually. So make a bunch of writing prompts. What do you do for your birthday? Your favorite season? If you have writers, make some visual steps. I want you to read the journal, assigned journal topic. You'll post at the front, brainstorm, think about it, write your journal, check your work, have a page, have a little proofreading check-in. Adult could do this with, with a student, or students could do this on their own. So don't get stuck in the like perfection pursuit here on the centers because you're gonna need different things for your kids to do while they're not with you. Let me read this question real quick and I'll jump back in. So Amanda has a really good question. She has some students that are in different groups, they're reading at levels H through P, but behaviors and meltdowns during centers and guided reading are a major disruption. How can I keep them on task? So that is an awesome question and The first step in my step 3, I have steps on steps here, is talking about behavior expectations. Some of that is ignoring peers, because if there is something going on in the other end of the room and you're asking a student to read a chapter book, that's pretty, pretty distracting. We'll talk about that in a few minutes. I have a bunch of different kind of ways to clarify expectations, but also ways to kind of refocus your group that's with you at the table. So once you kind of figure out what your independent centers are, your adult-directed centers are, then your student needs a schedule. How do they know where they're going? So if you have readers, again, keep it simple. Write it on the board. From 9:00 to 9:10, Johnny, Ashley, and Joe are with Miss Long. From 9:30 to 9:45, they're doing quiet reading. From 9:45 to 10:00, they're doing spelling words with Miss Blue, you know, kind of just go through exactly what they're doing. If students need visuals, do something like this. Just have a quick little check-in. We have guided reading, purple reading center, yellow reading center, pink reading center. Get a piece of purple construction paper, have students check in there, write what they're doing. It can be fancy and laminated, or guess what, it doesn't. You can have something like this, just having them check in on the blue. This is what we're doing today, these are the groups. This is really mostly for the adults, not even for the students, that's just for the adult, but that's a nice cue for the student as well. So have a way for students to know how they're rotating between centers and what they're doing. The key to this working is having it being, having it be very, very structured and very routine-based, because we know that that works well for our kids, and honestly, that works well for me. When my week is structured, when my week is routine-based, I'm more successful. So with something that's going to be more challenging like reading, we want to give our kids, you know, all the extra help that we can by giving them the tools they need to be successful, giving them the structure, giving them routines, schedules, things that are going to help them be more successful when things get hard. So you've done all your things, you've done your assessments, you've set up groups, you've set up centers, you've got schedules, you're sitting down with your kids, you've got 15-20 minutes What do you do? So before you even sit down those 15-20 minutes, you have to plan. And I really recommend whether you are an avid lesson planner or not, doing some type of simple lesson planning for this. And if your administrators don't require a lesson plan, you probably don't ever do it because who has time for all the extra things? But I think even something like this, I live by a monthly lesson plan. To me, that's just a really easy way to have quick ideas, but just having kind of what the week of, this is, you know, group number 3, what kids, and then what we're doing every day, something like that is awesome. You can get fancy and put in your strategies that you're working on and then just check ahead of time. So this is all the strategies this group might be working on and then just going through and checking, writing what book we're reading and then what strategy we're doing. So, you know, you could plan this out. This would take a little bit of time, but really not that much. You're picking, you know, maybe a handful of books because you might repeat some of your books, checking what strategy is going to go with each book, and then be done and ready to go. So having something simple, even if it's just that calendar template, and you can use something like this, or you can just Google a November calendar and print it and write in for each group what they're doing. Because you are teaching in a short period of time and because you're teaching groups back to back, you want to be ready when they come to you and you want to know exactly what you're doing with them. So if you only have 20 minutes, if you're spending the first 5 or 10 minutes getting organized, getting settled, finding what book you're reading, all that, half your time is gone. So you want to be really on top of what you're doing with each group. I get like on these mantras of preaching about certain things, and lately organization has been one of my topics because it's functional. A classroom that is a hot mess is rarely a classroom that is going super well. Organized means you can find it when you need it, and when your group comes and sits down and they look angelic and they're ready to learn, you better be ready to teach them. Because if you have to like go over to your desk or go over the bookshelf and find stuff and you come back Where are those kids? They're gone, they're long gone, and no judgment to them because you weren't ready. So having a simple lesson plan is going to make sure that you're ready when they are. So whatever kind of system works for you, I'm all for that. Okay, so you are planning what you're working on. You're picking your book, you're picking it at the level of that group. You're picking your focus topic. So there are all kinds of great resources for different focus topics for each level. So for students that are at level D, these are some things you need to work on. You know, we're gonna start reading books that have dialogue. So we wanna introduce what dialogue is and, okay, well, I picked a letter D book and there isn't any dialogue. Well, that's not gonna be our focus topic for today, but this book I'm picking tomorrow, there's a lot of dialogue. So we're gonna talk about that. That's gonna be what we focus on with this text. Because as books get more and more complicated, there's more and more things to work on. There's gonna be more advanced story elements. There'll be more advanced plots and more cause and effects to identify and more character traits, more inferences. So as students go through the reading levels, you're gonna have new concepts and focus topics to work on. So every day you wanna pick your book and you wanna pick your focus topic. And to me, picking the focus topic was something I did not do for a while. And I felt like I was trying to, do everything with every book we read. We would read a book and I was trying to work on so many different things and I was all over the place. And instead of my students really learning one concept, they learned a little bit of everything, which meant they learned nothing. So, and I really, when I shifted and started picking one thing to work on at a time in each of our sessions, that's when we made a lot more progress. And, you know, the data is going to be what's going to show you what's working, what's not. If you have a group that has a lot of language and is at those higher reading levels, then yeah, maybe you can pick 2 or 3 topics and you can kind of throw back to those previously mastered topics. That's great to have that generalization and maintenance there. But you want to have one that's really in the forefront of your head that you're going through when you go review that book together. So before you get to your book, you know, you've lesson planned, everyone's there, you're ready to go. Before we open the book is when we wanna do behavior, when we wanna talk about behavior. And this is something you're gonna do all year long. This isn't the first 2 weeks of August, this isn't every Monday, this isn't the first day of the quarter. We are constantly, constantly clarifying expectations, and we are constantly clarifying expectations in a way that our kids understand. I clarify expectations so much with my own children that now my like super sassy 4-year-old daughter will be like, "Mom, I know, I know what to do." I'm like, "Well, that's cool that you know, but I'm going to continue for the rest of your life because, sorry, your mom's a BCBA. I'm going to clarify expectations because that's what's going to help everyone be successful." So you want to clarify, specifically in a way each learner understands what you want from them. And that's not 50 things, that's like 2 or 3 things. These are the things I expect you to do. You want to talk about this, you want to practice this, you want to model this, you want to review this every day. Doesn't need to be long, can be 30 seconds, maybe some days needs to be 5 minutes. Maybe for a while before you ever crack open a book, you are just working on behavior and group behavior specifically. You're working on attending to peers, you're working on taking turns, you're working on reading quietly. Before you even get to that instructional level book, you're working on all that stuff first. If you have to do that for a month where you don't even get to your books, but you're just working on waiting and ignoring distractions and staying in your centers at the same time, That's fine because you're making a lot of progress on all of the structure and routine, and once you get to the academic component, you're gonna be really ready. Oh my gosh, there's all these comments. I should have been scrolling. Sorry guys. Um, let me read through these. Patricia said she feels like she's in freeze mode. Freeze mode is nice to be in though because you're like, I just won't have to make a decision yet. So sometimes freeze mode's good to be, but just jump in. If you feel like you've been stuck in freeze mode on a lot of this, just really jump in. Latonya asked about science reading materials for inclusion classes. I could do a whole other video on science. I'm gonna kind of stick with the guided reading, but I would love to do one on science. Okay, so you're gonna clarify behavior expectations. Let me grab a few little things that I wanted to show for this topic. So the first thing you want to clarify are those general focus expectations. What are things you want the student to do? What are things you don't want the student to do? What can they do instead? Figure out all those fun, like, replacement behaviors. I like something like this, like, guided reading expectations. I want you to listen. When it's your turn to read the book, you read it quietly. When we work on our book skills, we answer questions. So just kind of review that at the start of every session. So social stories, I think, can also be great to kind of review. It's going to give that script of what kind of things we're going to talk about, getting things wrong, when you don't get called on, those common problems that you're seeing, like if you're always seeing the same things come up, make a social story for that and review it right in that guided reading group. Or if they're going to inclusion class, review it right before they go to the inclusion class. The other thing you want to incorporate into this discussion is reinforcement. So we are asking our students to do something new and hard, and when we ask someone to do something new and hard, there needs to be reinforcement that follows. We are— our behaviors are reinforced if we continue to do them. If things especially are new and hard, I want to receive a lot of reinforcement if I'm going to continue to do that. And if you want to need to know what reinforcement is, go back to my podcast from a few weeks ago. About reinforcement gone wrong. Reinforcement does not necessarily mean candy. Reinforcement does not necessarily mean praise. Reinforcement is individual to each person. So you want to have some setup, whether it's a token board, whether it's a little group token chart. I think things like this work so well for guided reading groups. You can laminate this, put this on the board, having really clear expectations of things you're getting points for, having students earn points. You can give these throughout the group, so you're kind of tying in the expectations and the reinforcement piece. Oh, great question. How will this work with students who are nonverbal? This can all definitely work with students who are nonverbal. I'll get into some of the activities in a minute on— ooh, knocking over my table. On how to adapt some of this. And the assessment piece can be a little bit trickier when students don't have verbal skills, because a lot of the assessments are based on verbal answers. But I will go through that in a minute as well. Let me read the other two questions here. Yes, awesome comment here. This said, I worked so hard last year with small group instruction and for behavior expectations, and it's so great to see it work and become a well-oiled machine. And it made it so much easier this— this year and I get so many more centers in. So it's so true, once you get things going and if you spend the time on setting up all the expectations, things do start to fall into place. And it might not seem like that at the time, it might take some practice, but it will get there. Rolando asked, Rolando asked, where can you get these resources? Most of what I'm showing tonight, I just updated the Ultimate Guided Reading resource. Which is what made me think to do a live on this. I will add the link in here later. If you have it, it's basically a completely new product, so you'll— and you'll get it for free. So re-download it. If you don't have it, there's a whole video preview of everything that's in it. So I will add that link there. After you kind of review those expectations and reinforcement, then is the mini schedule. We're not done with schedules yet. Because you're doing a lot of different things in the group, you can use this with visuals or you can just write it on the board. Write down exactly what you're doing in those 15 or 20 minutes. We're gonna do word work, we're gonna read a book alone, we're gonna talk about the book, we're gonna answer questions, we're gonna do a writing activity. So write out exactly what you're doing in those 15 or 20 minutes so everyone's really clear. I observed a school, gosh, it was probably last year now, where a student was doing guided reading group in a resource group room and he really struggled and I, from a bird's eye perspective, this was very apparent right away for me, when there were activities where he was reading together versus when he was reading alone, he had a really hard time discriminating when that was happening. So when everyone was reading by themselves, he thought they were reading alone, so he was in everyone's business, and then he would get in trouble. And then the vice versa, if he wasn't participating because he was reading alone, he was getting in trouble then. So being really clear on what the child's, the expectations are for the child at that moment. So after you've clarified expectations and reinforcement, then you're gonna get to your instruction. And on Fountas and Pinell's website, which I really love and reference this a lot, they have 9 step-by-step tips. And again, I like having this kind of template. I think this is something you could print out and put kind of in your guided reading binder so you know. So I'm gonna kind of go through them real quick here. So one, reviewing those behavior expectations and that schedule. So exactly what we talked about. Introduce the target topic. So what are we working on? Okay, today we have, let's see, let me grab one of these. These are part of my new Ultimate Guided Reading resource. So these are target topics for each level. So Level D, so we are working on, let's find a good one, retell the story with details. Okay, so that's what we're working on. So we're gonna talk about what this means before we read our book. Then we're gonna introduce the book and do some pre-reading strategies. So add some visuals into the pre-reading. You know, what are we gonna do for pre-reading? First, we're gonna look at the COVID Then we're gonna do a book walk. Then we're gonna talk about the author. So we're gonna kind of do a few certain things before we read the book. Then students are gonna read the book on their own. This was a really big mistake I used to make with guided reading. We read the book all together. So we did kind of that choral reading where we all took turns and listened to each other. And in some of the research that I've done on guided reading, which I really see why that makes sense, is it really talks about having the students read the book individually. And if your students cannot read silently, that's where whisper phones are great, or they can just read quietly out loud to themselves. But when students are taking turns reading and everyone reads one page or one paragraph, first off, especially in a special ed classroom, students might not have kind of clear enunciation of words. So then it's harder for peers to understand what they're saying and comprehend the story. And if a book is only 10 pages and you have 3 kids in the group, that child's only reading like 3 pages. So you want to give each student the chance to read that book by themselves. So kind of going through that process, reading the book by themselves, then you're going to review it together. So you're taking a certain amount of time. Everyone's reading it silently or quietly by themselves. Once everyone's done, then you discuss and review the text. You go back through. Let's find all the dialogue. Let's find the story elements. Let's figure out the character traits of this character. Let's figure out the cause and effect that happened over here. Let's sequence out the story. So kind of going through and identifying all of those, you know, different things you've been working on, you're doing that together then. And then maybe you got— the next step here is teaching a specific language with a lesson with that focus topic. So maybe we're retelling the story with details. So let's everyone get out dry erase boards and let's add some making lists of details. Let's partner up, let's retell each other some of the details from the story. And then you can add in some kind of word work. There's obviously different phonics and other kind of letter and decoding-based skills that are going to go along with each level of text, because as you read more and more complex text, there's going to be more and more complex words. So you can do some word work. Step 8 they have here is extend the lesson through drawing and writing. I love this for our kids. I think that's a great great way to assess comprehension besides just relying on the verbal. So that's where I really advocate, and I'm going to talk a little bit about ways to tweak some of these steps here, um, but drawing and just kind of free drawing, free writing, free talking about the book is going to give you sometimes a lot of access to things that the student picked up that you didn't get before. And then the last step is kind of just reflecting on the lesson for a minute and talking about what you're doing the next So kind of going through that step-by-step process and making sure you hit all of those things really quickly, you're gonna get a lot of bang for your buck. So within that instruction, some, some things that I've utilized and some evidence-based strategies as well that I've pulled from kind of the ABA world into this guided reading framework are one, use of visuals and multiple exemplars. So to me, visuals are always really helpful as a prompt. And a prompt is gonna help our students be more successful and get the right answer. And I love visual prompts because we can fade them easier than my prompts, my gestural prompts or my verbal prompts, my indirect verbal prompts. So maybe using, I've talked about WH visuals so much, but when you ask a where question, there is a visual. And this visual is not telling the student the answer, it's cueing them. What type of answer you're looking for. Hey, where did he go to buy that bread in the story? And then you're pulling out the where picture. So I'm not saying, how much did he buy the bread for? Or who bought the bread? Or what did he buy after the bread? I'm saying where. So I'm looking for a location or a place. And it's all about here, the repetition and reinforcement. That's how we learn. So the more times you ask a where question, showing this visual and the student gives you the location and reinforcement happens, you need all of this for it to work, the more opportunities that skill is going to have to click. That, oh, when I hear where, it's about a place. So I need to think of the place and say the place. So we want to kind of have all of that happening a lot of times. And relying on these visual cues can be really helpful. That's why I like some of the, you know, these quick little strategy cards. One, because it helps you stay organized, but it's gonna give this little cue of like, ooh, these people fighting, that's the problem. That's like the bad thing that happened in the story. So when we keep using all of this language, problem and conflict and resolution and setting and characters, it gets overwhelming really quickly. But if we could just kind of focus in on this one thing, it's gonna give our kids more opportunities for success, to cue in to what we're looking for. So Lauren has a question I think that relates to what we're talking about right now. Lauren said, what do you recommend for a student who can read a Level D book but struggles with reading comprehension of anything he reads? So this question, I could, I could ask this a million times as myself, and I could, I've asked myself this, I've struggled with this, worked on this. If your student can read a Level D book, but cannot answer any comprehension questions, then Level D is not his instructional level. And I've seen this with so many clients, so many students, kids that can read far more fluently than they can understand. And sometimes that gap is huge. Kids can read a Level M book. They can read it, sounds perfect, but they have no idea what they read. So if you've done your due diligence to ensure that you've given him a lot of ways to show comprehension, which we'll talk about in one minute, then you wanna scale back and you wanna start where he's at with his comprehension needs. Because to be a Level D reader, you have to be able to answer in some way comprehension questions. And to me, I always wanna go to that instructional level because there is no functional point to be able to read a whole long book if you don't understand it, if you can't show what you've understand. So in those situations, one, you want to really rely on non-traditional ways to assess comprehension, and you want to really scale back and work on wh-questions. And you want to work on wh-questions away from the text. I, especially in early level text like A through D, a lot of the comprehension is just gonna be really concrete, but I see a lot of kids that can't yet answer a who, what, or where question about their environment or about things they know, and then we ask them a who, what, or where question about a text. So it's a much harder skill. We're asking them to read text, understand it, hear or list or read a question, process the question, and then match information from what they've read to that question. It's just much more complicated and you don't yet have that foundation of the WH questions. So this is actually something I've talked about before. I did my, my master's thesis on answering WH questions. I see how this affects a lot. So you really want to scale back to this. You want to scale back to answering WH questions about pictures, about everyday items, um, sorting things into WH questions, and scale back. And it feels like you're going backwards, but you're not. They need that foundation first. So I mentioned some non-traditional ways to talk about comprehension, and that was a question we got earlier too, was what about students who are not verbal? So you want to utilize whatever form of communication they have. If they have a PECS book, if they have an AAC device that is part of your guided reading group setup that is there with them, that's how they communicate. You want to make sure they have ways to answer questions, even if it's if you've started working on yes or no, if they have some of the options maybe in their AAC device of kind of some of the characters, like, and that can, you don't have to add specific characters, but like the boy, the girl. And then with an AAC device, this is something I've done with a client recently, we work on our wh-questions for listening comprehension with his device, and that has really been helpful for him knowing where in his device to navigate when he hears one of those questions. These questions. So when we say like, oh, like, you know, we read something to him, so it's because it's listening comprehension, then we say like, when, when did the boy go to the store? He now knows that he has to go in this, which sections of his AAC device to find the answer for the one question. What we got to find, we're going to the calendar page because I got to find Monday, versus going to the actions page to find a verb. So you want to embed and utilize that PECS book, that AAC device, And then you want to give a lot of different ways to assess comprehension. This really goes for students with and without any verbal skills beyond just verbally answering questions and beyond writing things. So having visual response options are great. You know, Sarah makes all of those amazing little book companion sets for all of our fun seasonal books. Those are a great tool to use for assessing comprehension because you have the pictures made, You can lay them out and be like, yeah, who did the old lady, you know, swallow next? Who did— who got on the bus next? And then you can put the pictures out and allow the student to use the pictures to answer. If your student has some reading skills but receptive language skills aren't very strong, I really recommend keeping a little mini dry erase board near your center and writing down your questions that you ask, your verbal questions, and almost like having it be like a little mini Scribe. So if you're like, oh, you know, where, you know, why did the girl get angry? Then you're writing down why did the girl get angry and giving that processing time, because we don't give as much processing time as we think. So when I say like, why did the girl get angry? And Johnny doesn't respond within 6, 7 seconds, I might come in right away with the prompt, I might come in right away with error correction, I might come in right away with the right answer, and maybe he just needed 15 seconds. Maybe he needed the visual cue, because it's a visual cue to write something saying, "Why did the girl get angry?" He needed to hear those words, see the letters here about that question, think about the text he read, and then find the answer or say the answer. So maybe he just needed more processing time. So thinking about how to add and ensure that you're adding more processing time when you're assessing comprehension on a regular basis. So other tips for kids with limited verbal skills and lower receptive language would be definitely be relying on their AAC devices or their PECS books, having visuals when you can to utilize for comprehension. Obviously we're not gonna have visuals for every single book in the world, but Remember, it can be just written out things. You can draw little pictures on a dry erase board. If the book is about, you know, a dog and a cat and a doghouse, draw a dog and a cat and a doghouse on a dry erase board. So then when you're asking, you know, like, where did the cat hide, your student can point to that doghouse or the backyard, you know, kind of giving little silly options there. And don't be like, oh my gosh, I'm not an artist. It doesn't matter. You're just giving that visual cue. So really relying on those visuals both for how you're asking comprehension questions and for how the student is going to show you what they know. Because that's what you really wanna figure out. Because the student is reading by themselves, you're not reading it to them because that's listening comprehension, they're not reading it together with their peers, they're reading the book by themselves. Now it's your job, it's like you're the detective to figure out if they understood it. And then it's your job to figure out, okay, all these cool strategies that apply to different texts, like, you know, character traits and the resolution and the main idea, can we go deeper than just understanding exactly the story? Can we go a little deeper to figure out, you know, all of these different layers involved, like author's purpose and first person versus second person perspective? So then we want to kind of take it that step further once we have that foundation. And with those early levels, A through D, A through year F even, we're really working on the concrete things there, you know, our basic story details, our basic sequencing, because that's all that's in those stories because it's easier words. Once we get more advanced, then we start getting a little bit more complicated and having more of those different inferential skills included in there. So that's kind of the instruction piece, which was a lot. I talked for like 15 minutes on that one. Your last icing on the cake of all of this is, of course, your data. If you thought you were gonna listen to a video from me without talking about data, you are very mistaken. So this gets complicated too, and this is where you might be frozen in making a decision because it's just too hard to take data on reading, so I'm just not going to, and I'm just gonna cross my fingers and hope no one asks me for data, and hope that my kids make progress and maybe it'll be fine. Nope. So since you have a small group, this is again why that small group instruction is super beneficial because you don't have 10 kids you're trying to take data on at once. You have a small group. So I really recommend sending up, setting up your data sheets with all of the students that are in your group on one page. So you're not flipping around trying to find different students and maybe you don't, you're not going to necessarily take data on all of them every single day. If you're a rock star you can, But having them all on one page so you can give them the option, or you can even try to just get data on 2 kids. I'm gonna take data on Jack and JJ. Things you can take data on: number of comprehension questions that they answered correctly. You can do some check-ins on reading fluency on a regular basis. That's pretty easy to do. This is a nice one per student where you just maybe every week, every other week, the date, the level of the book, how long you're recording, and then how many words they read. And that you can really do at the end of your guided reading time. You pull out the book that they already worked on, set your timer for 30 seconds, have them read, put a Post-it wherever they ended, send them off to the next center, and then later at your prep, count up how many words are in there and you write it in. Because you want to see that that reading fluency is improving over time. With those focus topics, This is a great spot to utilize those pinpointing behavior skills. If you remember the podcast episode, I wanna say it's episode 13, one of my friends, an amazing BCBA, was on and she— we were talking about precision teaching and pinpointing behaviors and she talks about learning channels. And this is a time that learning channels could be so helpful because what's gonna make your data collection easier is actually the more specific you get. 'Cause if you're trying to take data just like on their reading skills, like how did they read today? Like that is super subjective. You're gonna be like, I don't know, 4 out of 5? Like you're making stuff up because you don't know what you're taking data on. But if you get really specific, like here's question about story details and verbally answers question with, you know, regarding story details. Okay, cool, I can easily say yes or no. Sees written WH question and touches answer to WH question with picture. Cool, we all know exactly what that means. So I'm not gonna get too much into learning channels, but I will add the link to that podcast episode. So be specific with what the skill is. If it's identifying details, what's the learning channel there? And then track how many correct and how many incorrect. So then you know kind of what we're looking at as far as these skills that we've been working on. One great, great little data sheet too, the last one I'm going to show you, is for students that have higher language and higher reading skills, having them track their own reading levels. And I like this self-graphing— this is, I'm in reverse here, so I keep pointing to the wrong area— this self-graphing data sheet. So having over time them track their levels to see progress, because we want, you know, our kids to kind of get into this as well and to see success and be proud of their success and to really see how literacy gives them options in so many different areas. So that's it. I really wanted this to be 20 minutes and it was like almost an hour, so sorry. I hope I got to most of your questions. I will come back on here later tomorrow and I will answer some updates. So if you're not watching this live, you know, still feel free to pop some questions in. But I hope this gave you some ideas and some good takeaways and action items. And the moral of all of this is keep it simple and just get started. And do those best practices that work in other areas of your classroom—structure, visuals, having a communication system—and use that in your literacy instruction, because that's where your students are going to have a lot of success. Your students that are nonverbal or preverbal or with emerging verbal skills can still do this. They can still read that text on their own. They can still show what they know with their AAC device, with their PECS book, with visuals. So they can still be included in all of these systems just like any other class student would in your classroom. So hope everyone has a good Tuesday, and let me know any other topics that we should do a live on. Alright, bye!