Phonics International

Guided reading in action: digging deeper at the dump

Alison Dawkins is a Teaching and Learning Adviser for English at Herts for Learning

For me, the best ever end to a guided reading session goes something like this: ‘No, I’m sorry, we have to stop talking about it now; we’re out of time’. The children sigh, then brighten and say: ‘I can’t wait to read some more tomorrow.’


This happened to me the other day. The book was Stig of the Dump by Clive King and the children were in year 5. They were just starting the book and had pre-read some of the first chapter independently the day before our session. That meant we would be able to focus attention for our discussion on one or two shorter extracts from those pages. I’d picked my objective, taken from the HfL reading criteria for Y5: ‘comments on how a character is built and presented, referring to dialogue, action and description’ and presented that to the children as: ‘Let’s see what this first chapter tells us about the two main characters’.