Guided Reading Lesson Planning

Today I wanted to share how I organized my lesson plans and student observations in my Guided Reading binder last school year. 

First off, I used a 1-inch binder with tabbed dividers to keep everything organized and in one place. My dividers were numbered 1-24. These numbers represented the number of kiddos in my class (At the beginning of the year each student is assigned a number). 

At the front of the binder, I placed my lesson plans for each group in a clear plastic protector. I used sticky notes to write my plans on and attached those to the plastic protector to cover up each of the boxes shown above. For my plans, I wrote the title of the book, a quick description of the book, important vocabulary that I wanted to introduce to my kids, the skills I wanted to focus on, and guiding questions that I wanted to make sure to ask my kids as they read. At the top, I wrote in the date and group name using a dry erase marker.

The page pictured above was placed on the back side of my lesson plans. Here I wrote student observations on sticky notes and placed them in each box. I also used this page to record student observations for different subject areas as well. That's why there is a box to write the subject. After meeting that week with my group, I would move the sticky notes to another page (same page, different copy) behind the student's number. That way I could keep records of what we worked on each week. 

A few things I wanted to point out... 1. I spread out these lessons over the course of a week. On average, I would meet with each group twice a week. That's why there are so many skills listed. 2. The vocabulary are words that are essential for kids to know in order to understand the text. I would do a quick introduction to each word on day one when I first introduced the book. As I checked in on students throughout the week, we would revisit the words as needed. 

This is the student observations page that I copied on the back of the lesson plan. As you can see, I wrote the student number at the top so I would know what notes belonged to which student. I typically had 4-6 kids in a group. 

This is a second copy of the same page from above, but I have placed this copy behind each student's tabbed divider. Here are two weeks of observations on this particular student. 

I hope this helps you keep your Guided Reading Binder a little more organized next year! If you have any questions, leave them below. As a thank you for reading, you can grab a copy of these pages on TPT for free here!