Selecting the right texts for guided reading is a skill worth mastering

When it comes to choosing novels for your class, never judge a book by its cover – or its length, or its font size.

How often have you seen children equate challenging reading with progressing to longer books? When Just Imagine started working on the Developing Excellence in Reading project, this was one of the main issues we found with books provided for guided reading in schools. The length of a book was viewed as a badge of honour, but generally the only challenge the selections offered was the stamina required to tackle the hefty tomes.

The project began in 2014 with a consortium of primary and secondary schools in Richmond. Our broad aim was to develop a pedagogy that would extend and challenge the highest-attaining readers
in the junior years into lower secondary. At the outset, it was evident that if the project was to be a success, choosing the right material would be crucial. Audits were carried out to assess the quality of resources available for group and guided reading, and this initial review threw up a number of important issues. You may be familiar with a few:

• The aforementioned idea that bigger books mean bigger challenges.
• Texts used for group and guided reading were often too long, so children did not get to experience full texts, or they lost momentum between sessions. Some were better suited to whole-class or independent reading.
• There was an overuse of a limited number of authors and insufficient mapping of the range of writers that children would experience during the primary years.
• Some text types were underused in guided and group reading, including more challenging picture books, poetry, short story collections, and non-fiction.
• There were few connections made between the texts and no evidence of bridging texts, for instance by using a simpler text subject before moving to a more challenging text on the same theme.
• The selection of ‘classic’ texts was problematic. Teachers wanted to provide access to classic stories, but many of the books available to them were poor and cheaply produced adaptations lacking in child appeal.

Having identified some of the problems, we devised guidance for book selection, provided draft book lists for teachers to trial, ran workshops and held selection meetings for staff in schools.

Picture books for older readers

The first workshop looked at using picture books with high-attaining readers. Picture books require a different kind of reading, a slower-paced looking, which was exactly what our high-attaining speed readers needed. We had evidence of them missing vital clues in their reading because they read too quickly and we thought that exposure to picture books would help make explicit the point that tiny details can make very big differences to an interpretation of a text.

There were some initial concerns that the children and their parents might regard the books as unsuitable for their high-attaining readers, but these concerns were unfounded. Teachers noticed that the discussion about the picture books was more animated and inclusive, and there were additional benefits too: although the project was mainly concerned with high-attaining readers, working with picture books made it possible for groups of mixed reading abilities to access the same text and benefit from discussions.

Tips for selecting picture books for older readers

• Choose texts with deep and interesting themes for discussion.
• Look for texts that employ interesting visual and verbal language.
• Look at the ways in which the text and pictures work together. For example, plain text does not necessarily mean the book is simple. It may be used ironically when read alongside the pictures.
• Make sure every child has his or her own copy – children need to be able to explore at their own pace, as well as share ideas in the group.

5 great books for older readers

• Memorial – Gary Crew and Shaun Tan
• Major Glad, Major Dizzy  – Jan Oke
• Unforgotten  – Tobhy Riddle
• Flotsam – David Wiesner
• Farther  – Graham Baker-Smith

Choosing poetry

Poetry, with its compressed and richly allusive language, affords lots of opportunities for readers to respond on many levels and to read between the lines. The length of a poem usually means that the whole text can be accessed in one lesson, although it may be returned to in subsequent lessons. Returning to a text after the reader has started to process her thinking is really important as it allows her to build on initial thoughts and take them further. There are many instances where we observed an epiphany moment on a second or third reading.

In our auditing we found that poems were mainly used as models for writing, or in connection with curriculum topics, and many seemed to have be written expressly for that purpose. The criteria for selecting poems was being driven by factors other than the quality of the poetry. Consequently, we felt the poems lacked depth or were too obvious to generate much discussion. The advantage in having one good poetry anthology in the classroom is that it will resource many lessons. Individual poems can be selected from the anthology to match the interests and needs of different groups.

Tips for selecting poetry:
• Have at least one set of a good anthology available in every classroom. This is excellent value for money when you consider how many lessons one anthology can support.
• Make a range of poetry available for reading across the year, regardless of the poetry children are writing: humorous, lyric, classic, modern, rhyming, non-rhyming, single-poet collection, thematic collection, etc.
• Include poetry written for adults such as Ted Hughes’ animal poems and classic narrative poems.
• Make sure the newest poets are represented along with the well-established and the classic.
• Keep an eye on the CLPE Poetry Award shortlisted books (clpe.org.uk). Buying a couple of sets each year will keep your collections up to date.

5 Super poetry books to update your collections
• Werewolf Club Rules  – Joseph Coelho
• Stars in Jars  – Chrissie Gittins
• My Life as a Goldfish  – Rachel Rooney
• Poems from the First World War  – Gaby Morgan
• A Laureate’s Choice  – Carol Ann Duffy

Short story collections and shorter novels

As with poetry, short fiction can be read in one or two lessons. It is easier for teachers to read and know the whole text, which allows for a higher quality reciprocal discussion. Short stories such as Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales may be a more digestible introduction to the classics than a longer novel, and will help to familiarise children with the diction and register of pre-20th-century text.

Of course, short fiction doesn’t entirely replace the need to read longer novels, which require readers to keep the plot in their heads over many different episodes as well as navigate the complexity of subplots. However, a mixed menu of shorter and longer texts planned across the year makes the organisation manageable and potentially more productive.