Guided Reading: Organization

How do you organize your guided reading materials?  Organization is definitely important so you can quickly grab the materials that you need quickly.   I like to have everything right by my guided reading small group tables.  I have a drawer cart and a table close by where I try to keep most of what I will need.

TEACHER MATERIALS:

My drawer cart is where I keep student materials.  I have two boxes of magnetic letters on top of my cart along with an iPad.  I use a lot of magnetic letters!

I explained how I use an iPad to keep my running records and anecdotal records in my last post.  If you missed it, you can read it here. 

The top of my table is full!  I really could use one just a little bit bigger.  Fly Guy is a favorite of my students so he sits there keeping us company!  I keep a big bottle of Germ X to keep those sometimes grimy or slobbery little hands from dirtying up the books.  I keep the stylus pens by my basket instead of in the student material baskets so the tips don't get broken off of the ends.  I really like the 3 drawer boxes.  I could really use them in a lot of different places! 

I have guided reading groups from kindergarten, first grade, and second grade along with my RtI groups.  This means having a lot of different materials and trying to find ways to make them work across grade levels so I don't have so many materials to keep track of.  For me, less is more!  The pom poms are for marking sounds on linking charts and for phonemic awareness activities.  Sometimes I use them along with the paint strips to push the sounds into the boxes.  

Each grade and each RtI group has a drawer in my drawer cart.  Inside the drawers (which surprisingly hold quite a few things), I keep group materials.  So when a group comes in for guided reading, I can just pull their drawer and have what I need for them.  In this drawer, I keep sight word folders, that week's shared reading book and read aloud, plus the set of books the group will be reading.  You can read about the sight word folders here.  

STUDENT MATERIALS

I keep a little basket for each student on my tables that have most everything they will need for our lessons.  

This is a better look at what all we keep in our baskets.   The paint strips are for stretching words and hearing sounds when we are writing and for phonemic awareness activities.  We also keep reading strategy bookmarks to remind us what we can do to help us in tricky parts.  I use different colors of plastic cups for magnetic letters.  One color for first grade and one for second grade.

I found these cups at Dollar General.  I went in looking for something different and ended up with these.  I think they are going to work fine.

One more important part of our student materials is the reader's notebook.  I really like having the sections tabbed to make it easier for students to find where they need to be.  We keep a LOT of learning in our notebooks!