Click the video box below to see the program in action with a group of 1st grade students

Teachers support students with a defined set of resources designed to develop and activate the necessary skills needed to progress in their reading development. Each reading level guide below details the materials teachers use during small group leveled instruction during the three stages of a guided reading lesson: 

• Before Reading: The pre-reading work teacher and students engage in before opening the book including oral drills, reading skill focus review and/or comprehension focus discussions.

• During Reading: The prompts the teacher uses to help students with decoding and other reading skills

• After Reading: Includes the discussions students have with each other and the teacher about the story including retell and finding evidence to answer comprehension questions.

*Click on the images or the links below to open a close-up detail of each guide!

In the early reading levels, emphasis is placed on developing knowledge of letter identification, letter sounds and early sight words. Word solving strategies and basic retell skills are also introduced to build self-help strategies. The books all have a basic pattern the increase in complexity towards the end of the year. As students progress in their reading skills, more complex questions are asked to build the foundation of comprehension skills.

In lower elementary grades, students still start each lesson with a sight word review, along with a review of work solving strategies. At level G, students are introduced to comprehnsion strategies. Students are moving from "learning to read" to "reading to understand". The stories are more complex and students are asked to think about character thinking,  relationships and motivation. After students are done reading, the teacher leads robust comprehension conversations where students must present evidence from the text to justify their responses.

In upper elementary, students begin to transition into increasingly complex texts including short novels. At this level, students have moved beyond learning to read and are focused on reading to learn, explore and understand the world around them. The comprehension focus includes discussion on theme and context where student point of views are vertified by the strenght of the evidence they use in thier arguments.