Super Simple Small Group Planning
Planning small groups is arguably one of the most important pieces of lesson planning that we do each week. But it also feels like one more thing added to the list after you’ve planned all of your whole group lessons, center activities, morning work, intervention, homework, and more.
No one wants to spend more time planning complicated lessons. But, we also all want to teach lessons that grow our students. We want good data. We want our students to be successful. We just don’t want to kill ourselves to get there.
I have good news! We can have our cake and eat it, too. Like with just about everything on this blog, I got tired of pouring over my small group plans, only to not be able to get to everything, have the lessons fall flat, or just change the plan on a dime. So, I developed a super simple small group planning routine that saved me a lot of time and stress. I’m sharing those steps with you today!
Simple Steps for Small Group Planning
Step One: Know the Data, and Set a Goal
I use my small group planner from the very first week of school, through the entire year. It helps me collect, organize, and utilize my student reading data. You can learn more about how I use the planner in this post.
In this post, I am also referencing the pieces of my small group lesson planning page. You do not have to use this page to use the tips from this post, but if you want it, it’s included in this planner!
At the top of the planning page, there is a space to name the objective or goal of the lesson. If your students’ skill focus is always comprehension in a particular group, maybe the objective is to be able to answer comprehension questions with at least 80% accuracy. If it’s fluency, maybe it’s that they will read a grade-level text at a rate that is a certain number of words higher than last time. If you know your data well, setting these objectives will come easily!
Step Two: Choose the Warm-Up
I start every small group lesson with a warm-up. I like for the warm-up to be targeted to that group’s primary focus. For second graders, I always think of the warm-up as one of four things. Reviewing previously learned phonics patterns, using fluency warm-up cards for a fluency group, telling a brief story and reviewing the beginning middle, and end with some brief comprehension questions, or simply discussing what we talked about last time.
Limiting yourself to just four quick warm-ups makes it easy to fill in that section of your lesson planning page every time. You won’t have decision fatigue from trying to decide which activity to work in, and the structure of the beginning of your lesson stays the same every time.
Step Three: Select the Text
This part may be super fast because it’s already done for you. You may have leveled readers you are required to use in your curriculum. If you’re looking for skill-based reading passages, check these out. They are a great way to review the skill you’re currently teaching in class, while also working in fluency and comprehension practice, as needed.
Step Four: Grab Some Sticky Notes and Mark-Up the Text!
Whether it’s a reading passage, a small group reader, or an article, grab some sticky notes and read through the text. In second grade, this typically can be done in just a couple of minutes. A reading passage or article written at a second-grade level can be read by an adult in five minutes or less. A chapter of a novel takes about the same amount of time.
As you’re reading, think about the things you want to emphasize for your students. Where are you going to have them pause and think about what’s happening? What words are you going to stop and notice the phonics patterns of? What vocabulary are you going to preview? Stick notes with talking points, highlight, write in the margins…do what you need to do to map out a full lesson from beginning to end.
Keep your copy of the marked-up text right with your lesson planning document. That way, as you transition from one group to the next, you have your full lesson plan right there in the order that you were going to be teaching it. As your students read through the text, you don’t have to go back and forth between a lesson plan and a text to remember what your teaching points were.
Once you have the lesson fully mapped out, it only takes a minute or two to jot down the steps on your planning document. If your principal requires that you turn in a copy of your small group plans, you may need to do that every time. I’d typically just let the notes in the text be enough unless I were being observed. No need to write the same thing twice unless you have to!
Step Five: Jot Down an Exit Task or Assessment
There is absolutely no point in teaching a small group lesson if you are not going to record how the students are doing with the skill. Your assessment should be aligned to the goal that you have for your students (from step one). The assessment can be embedded into the lesson. For example, if the goal was answering comprehension questions with at least 80% accuracy, then make some checkmarks in your student notes page of how many questions each student got correct as you ask them throughout the text.
The assessment can also happen after the lesson or after a series of lessons. Maybe we will give a mini comprehension quiz about the entire text at the end. Or maybe you will do a brief timed read after teaching the text in full. Whatever you decide to use as a measure of student achievement, jot it down on the planning page so you don’t forget to do it!
Of course, the final step is that you will teach the lesson and reflect on how the students did with the objective. That makes planning the next lesson even easier.
On the surface, this may seem like a lot of work. But once you get in a rhythm with following the steps, it all goes by very quickly!
What steps do you take to plan small groups?