'Journey to the River Sea' Guided Reading Planning - Y5&6

Guided reading planning for Y5/Y6 more able readers based on the text ‘Journey to the River Sea’. Six sessions of planning are included, although in reality it could spread over a much longer period of time if you wanted! The other files included are pictures of the Amazon used in lesson one.

The planning includes teacher discussion prompts (each linked to AFs) and a follow up reading activity.

In my class I had four groups and ran guided reading over four days. Each group had one session with me and three independent days. The pupils followed this cycle over the four days:

1. Pre-reading in preparation for Book Club.
2. Preparing answers for Book Club. Children had a preview of some of the more complex questions and wrote their answers in their reading journals. This had the benefit of me being able to ‘pick on’ any child without them being flustered, but also meant I had some written evidence for all pupils every week (I was finding that some weeks I hadn’t written any notes for some pupils during the Book Club session).
3. Book Club with teacher.
4. Follow-up task.
   Each group knew which day of the week was their follow-up/Book Club/prep day.
   On the fifth day I heard individual readers and the pupils did free reading of their own books/magazines. I sometimes used this day to catch up if we had missed a guided reading session earlier in the week due to special assemblies etc. (often the case!).