4 Ways to Grow Readers in Small Groups

When I first started teaching, I had the hardest time figuring my small groups out.

I was handed a reading curriculum, and that was easy enough to figure out. I didn’t love every piece of the curriculum, but I appreciated that it was mapped out for me.

But, as a new teacher, I became very aware that the ‘heart’ of my reading instruction was supposed to be my small group time. My whole group lessons were meant to be focused and brief, and one-size-fits-all. Then, my small group table was where I was supposed to make the magic happen. I was expected to differentiate, remediate, enrich, engage, and simply meet each individual child where they were and grow them from there.

And that sounds beautiful. But the hard part? I had no resources for that. Sound familiar?

Small group instruction rarely comes with a teacher’s manual. And, if it does, it will never meet the needs of your students well. Because it’s impossible for a curriculum company to anticipate the needs of every child in your classroom and know how to reteach and enrich all of them.

So, I’ve found that it’s better to focus on small group strategies that work, no matter the text or skill.

So, today I have four ways to grow your readers during small group time, and you can use these with any passage, curriculum, text, etc!

Tip One: Be Explicit in How You Model Comprehension

If you are teaching main idea, and you have a group of students who have not mastered main idea, be super clear about what it looks like to find the main idea of a passage. Model it. Read through the text with them and talk about the questions you have, the thinking you’re doing, etc.

I also find it very helpful to break things down to a series of steps. So, if they need to find the main idea, give them a checklist of exactly how to do that (no matter the book or article). This formula for teaching main idea is one example of how I give my students a series of steps to follow that they can rely on with any text!

Letting student watch you carry out a task to completion first gives them a visual of what it should look like when they are doing the work. So often, we ask students to read a text and then we start asking them questions to prompt them into applying the skills. But, most of the time, our students have no idea what the act of comprehending a text should even look like. What should they be asking themselves? What should they be noticing? How do they engage with a text? Showing our students what it looks like to read a text and find evidence of a skill is an important first step.

Tip Two: Teach Metacognition

How often do you have to reread something when you are reading? This may be because you lost your train of thought, or the text was super complex. But we all have had moments where we finished a page and realized that we have no idea what we just read.

Thinking about your own thinking while you’re reading is called metacognition. Being aware of your own comprehension as you go through a text is part of that metacognition.

And it does not come naturally. We have to teach our students to think about what they are thinking about while they read.

The best way to do this? Model it to make it concrete. Read something and say ‘Hmmm. I’m not sure I understand all of that very well. I’m going to reread it to make sure it makes sense.” Ask students to stop and jot what they are thinking about in the middle of a complex paragraph. Ask them to reread if they did not understand something that they just read.

Consistently ask them to monitor their own understanding, and make it clear that it’s very normal to have to read something a 2nd time to make sense of it! This is a lifelong comprehension tool that will absolutely help them grow. No matter what text they are reading, this will transfer.

Tip Three: Mix it Up

Avoid leaning too heavily on one or two genres of text in small groups. A wide variety of genres, text lengths, topics, etc. will inspire your students to find what they enjoy reading.

Also, the more variety you expose students to, the better the chance of each student encountering texts that they have personal connections to. This helps boost comprehension, because students can activate background knowledge as they are reading. This goes for both fiction and nonfiction. Fiction stories are easier to comprehend when we can relate to the plot and put ourselves in the shoes of the main character. The wider the variety of the stories, the more opportunities there are for each of your students to see themselves in the texts.

We all know that the secret to growing as readers is to read more often. But, we can’t go home with our students and encourage them to pick up a book. Instead, what we can do is open their minds in class to the different types of reading that exists. Small groups is a great time to do that. When you see one of your more reluctant readers engaging with a particular topic or genre, it’s a great opportunity to find other books or articles on that same topic. Then, you can promote more reading away from your small group table!

Tip Four: Employ a Variety of Reading Techniques

I love to switch up the structure of my small groups to get my students reading in different ways. One day they may listen to me read part of a passage, and then they silently re-read it to themselves. Other times we may partner read, echo read, choral read, or whisper read. I also love to send students away in my higher achieving groups to read together and then come back to discuss.

I also very consistently prompt my students to use a variety of strategies as they read, on top of the skill that we are working on. Maybe we are working on main idea, and that’s the standard that my students need to master. But, the only way they will be able to synthesize the text to identify the main idea is if they actually understood what they read. So, as they are reading, I want them to use strategies to help them understand: ask and answer questions, make and revise predictions, look at text features and see how they help you understand, stop and jot down words you don’t know so you can look them up, etc. Understanding the text on the front end makes it so much easier for students to pull skills (main idea, cause and effect, theme, etc) out of the stories.

Changing the routine, and the way that students read, keeps their brains active and engaged. It’s harder to mentally check out when you never know what your teacher is going to ask of you. I want each of my students to feel safe and comfortable with my group, but I also want each of them to be held accountable to actually work hard to grow! Read a sample of my weekly small group routine here!

SIDE NOTE

Each of these strategies only works if your students are fluently decoding and reading the texts you are providing. I highly recommend following the science of reading and how our students’ brains progress through the process of learning how to read in order to comprehend. If you have a ‘phonics’ group that is still working on decoding and encoding skills, they will not be ready to deepen their comprehension skills quite yet. You can read more about the Science of Reading and how that applies to 2nd grade readers here!

FREE Reading Passages for You!

If you want some new texts to engage your students, I have a year-long bundle sampler pack for you to try out! In this free download, you’ll receive one biography, two nonfiction texts and two fiction texts. These each come with comprehension questions and answer keys, along with skill-based graphic organizers!

These passages are pulled from different sets in my Year-Long Reading Passages Bundle. You can check out more reading passages here!