Guided Reading
Guided Reading at St Aidan’s Catholic Primary School
At St Aidan’s we want to instil a lifelong love of reading in every child. We want our children to develop as confident and capable readers, who develop a love of reading and have all the skills necessary to help them understand what they read. As part of our guided reading, we use an approach called Reading Gems.
What are Reading Gems?
Reading Gems is a reading strategy that aims to teach children to take pleasure in reading by themselves, listening to someone else read, and sharing texts with adults and other children. Different and specific key skills are taught explicitly to the children through discussions about texts, teacher modelling and opportunities to answer questions independently or with support where needed. Each new reading skill is allocated a colour-coded ‘gem’. Every week, children focus on a certain reading gem and learn strategies to help them develop that particular skill. Phonics is taught separately to ensure the children develop the necessary decoding strategies that underpin all reading.
Please click on the link to see the structure of the week and for more information about the Reading Gems.