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Small Group Reading Instruction That’s Science of Reading Aligned

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Setting up effective reading groups can transform your classroom by providing targeted instruction that meets your students’ unique needs.

However, getting started can feel overwhelming. This guide will walk you through each step, from assessing your students’ skills to planning engaging lessons and monitoring progress.

By focusing on skill-based grouping aligned with the science of reading, you’ll create an environment where every learner can thrive.

Whether you’re new to small-group instruction or looking to refine your approach, this practical guide will help you implement reading groups that work.

How to Set Up Reading Groups

There are 4 steps to create and run small groups successfully:

1. Assess

Of course, the first step is to assess your students. Without this, you won’t know your students’ strengths and weaknesses and cannot plan appropriate instruction. Data is key!

Assessment Options

There are many assessment options out there, and you likely already have something provided to you by your school. But if you don’t, or you’re not sure what to assess, here are some guidelines.

You want to start off with a screening assessment, and follow up with a diagnostic assessment for students who showed a weakness in the screener.

Some assessment options include:

You can find more assessment recommendations and tips in this guide to assessing literacy skills.

What To Assess?

For K-2, you’ll want to focus on decoding, alphabet knowledge, and phonemic awareness. Spelling inventories, the PAST, and ORF are good great assessments to include. You will want to use ORF to monitor over time and make adjustments to your instruction and groups.

For grades 3 and up, you can start with a spelling inventory, PAST, and ORF assessment. You still want to use ORF to monitor over time and make adjustments to your instruction and groups.

2. Group Students By Skill Level

Now that you have some data to work with, you can start to create your groups.

While it’s been common to group students by reading level for many years, that is not recommended as it doesn’t align with the science of reading.

Instead, you want to group you students based on reading skills, specifically Ehri’s Phases of Word Reading Development (pictured below).

Looking at these phases, you can look for patterns in your data and group your students based on these four reading levels. You will likely have many students in one or two of them and you can split them into more than one group if needed.

3. Plan

Now that you have your groups, it’s time to plan your lessons for small group time.

READ THIS ⬇️

Before moving on, I strongly recommend you read this article by Timothy Shanahan: What Should Small Group Reading Instruction Look Like? It addresses the different reasons to work with students in small groups with great examples and ideas. This additional article on whether or not to group students is also great food for thought.

Below is an example of a 120 minute literacy block showing whole group and small group activities. Your time with each small group should be between 10-20 minutes. But it doesn’t have to be the same every day. Sometimes students need more time, and sometimes they need less time. Don’t stick to a time schedule if it’s not needed or doesn’t work for you.

So what are you supposed to do in your small groups? Here are some ideas for each area of literacy:

Alphabet Knowledge

You’ll want to focus on the alphabetic principle with pre and emergent readers, students who cannot decode, students who spell without vowels, and students who have no directionality in writing.

Areas to focus on include oral language, phonological awareness, and alphabet knowledge including letter names, sounds, and letter formation. Once students acquire concepts of print, know about half of the alphabet, and can represent previously taught beginning and final sounds, including using vowels in spelling, you can move on to the decoding level.

Activities you can do include: syllable segmenting, syllable blending, onset and rime, explicit direct instruction of letter names, sounds, and formation, dictation, echo and choral reading, modeling tracking while reading, and making oral predictions.

using an alphabet arc to review letter names and sounds

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Decoding

You’ll want to focus on decoding with students who fail to meet ORF benchmarks, read at or below 1st grade level, are learning to read and spell words with consonants, short vowels, consonant digraphs and blends, and high frequency words.

Areas to focus on include phonemic awareness, explicit phonics, and developing sight word vocabulary. Once students can read above a 1st grade level, are proficient with closed syllables, and don’t need to focus on decoding each word, you can move on to the fluency level.

Activities you can do include: rereading, choral and echo reading, pared/partner reading, phoneme blending and segmenting, explicit direct instruction on letter names, sounds, and formation, dictation, word hunts, and use of decodables.

phonological awareness umbrella graphic

Fluency

You’ll want to focus on fluency with students who read between a 1st and 3rd grade level, read accurately but slowly for age norms, and are learning to read and spell VCe, vowel teams, and r-controlled vowels in stressed syllables and multisyllabic words.

Areas to focus on include: developing accuracy, reading rate, expression, phrasing, and building stamina to read longer, more complex texts, and supporting reading comprehension with teacher support. Once students can read at or beyond a 4th grade level with accuracy and with appropriate rate and prosody, you can move on to the comprehension level.

Activities you can do include: timed repeated reading, reader’s theater, grammar instruction, rereading, phonemic awareness, spelling features, morphology instruction, instruction in reding multisyllabic words, making predictions, think-alouds, oral reading, discuss and respond, vocabulary instruction, and summarizing and retelling.

fluency reading activity using nonsense words for small group reading instruction

Comprehension

You’ll want to focus on comprehension with students who read at a 4th grade level or beyond, read accurately and smoothly for age norms, and read and spell multisyllabic words and learns common syllable patterns, inflected endings, and derived spellings. 

Areas to focus on include: promoting reading comprehension, building vocabulary, developing written response to texts, encouraging a close reading of the text, and building content knowledge about the topic. 

Activities to do include: morphology instruction, advanced spelling instruction, vocabulary instruction, making predictions, think-alouds, inferencing, and discussing and responding to the text.

young girl reading a book to practice her reading comprehension in small group instruction

What about the rest of your students?

Your other students need to be working independently to ensure your small group instruction is uninterrupted and effective. Provide them with engaging and meaningful activities that support their needs. You can do this with a variety of center or activities. These include:

  • Word work
  • Literacy centers
  • Follow up activity from the small group lesson
  • Independent reading
  • Read a decodable text
  • Partner reading
  • Summary writing or filling out a graphic organizer about a text
  • Listening to an audiobook
  • Spelling practice
  • Handwriting practice
  • Peer dictation
  • Phonics games students can play with a partner or small group
  • Heart word practice
  • Phonics apps or computer games
  • Writing activity/journal
example of a word work activity for an independent small group

Create centers based on providing cumulative review and practice of the target skills. Activities should be easy for students to complete on their own, and should not be busy work.

You’ll need to be very explicit in your instruction and set clear expectations, providing lots of practice at the beginning of the year (or whenever you implement your groups) to ensure students are independent during this time. It will take at least a few weeks of practice for your students to be able to work independently during this time.

Controlling Behaviors

One of the biggest problems you’ll have is controlling students’ behavior while you sit with a small group. Often times, students in other groups are not on task and can get loud and disruptive. But there is an easy way to prevent many of these behaviors: systems.

Systematize your lessons and students will know the routine and get to work. If you use the same activities and routine, and just swap out the phonics skill, students know exactly what to do. There is less time spent teaching routines and new activities (and you spend less time planning). When students don’t know what to do or have the chance to mess around, they will. But having a set routine will help reduce these behaviors.

This is why I love using simple work work activities at literacy centers, like word mapping worksheets and activities, where all you have to do is swap out the phonemes and graphemes or words. In this example, you can set up the center with laminated sheets, manipulatives, a sound wall, grapheme or word flashcards, dry erase markers, and something to erase with. The center looks exactly the same the whole year, but every week it has a different list of phonemes, graphemes, and words for the students to focus on.

example of an assessment of heart words for progress monitoring

4. Monitor Progress & Make Adjustments

Use exit tickets, weekly assessments, and ORF assessments to monitor progress and make adjustments to your instruction and groups. If students are not making progress, then adjust your instruction. The students who do make progress, may need to move to a different group, or your lessons can be include more advanced skills.

Small groups are flexible and will change. Students will move at different paces and switch groups throughout the year.

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Conclusion

Implementing effective reading groups requires thoughtful planning, consistent assessment, and flexibility to adapt as your students grow. By focusing on skill-based grouping, aligning instruction with the science of reading, and fostering independent learning routines, you can create an environment where every student has the opportunity to thrive.

Remember, small groups are dynamic, and progress monitoring will help you make adjustments as needed. With clear systems in place and a commitment to meeting your students where they are, you’ll empower them to become confident, capable readers.

Sources:

small group reading instruction sor aligned

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