Back to School Basics: Guided Reading Folders : Differentiated Instruction

Organization Help: Once school routines are underway, I level my Kindergarten class into four guided reading groups: high, medium, low, and focus (RTI) groups based on their beginning literacy assessments in phonemic awareness, phonics, sight words, and writing. (More detail) In order to make differentiating instruction for each level more organized, I keep a tub behind my guided reading table with four folders squared away: one for each group.

Guided Reading Organization
One folder for each leveled group
Keep activities inside each group's folder

I use shape groups because they have to learn their shape names anyway so why spend class time naming and referring to "animal groups" or other silly, cute terms? I'd rather keep things simple. I pull out each folder when I see each group during rotations. This folder system makes sub plans easy too because I simply state to pull out a lesson from each shape groups' folder. Saves me from sticking post it notes all over different piles of paper or books in the room! 

Each leveled group has a folder that contains differentiated
activities for their reading level. 

In the picture shown above, the Triangle group's folder contains 3 guided reading leveled readers from Houghton Mifflin, their beige dictation book ( I let them decorate their cover with markers) where I ask them to spell CVC words, or CCVC and CVCC words to practice their segmenting skills. Also, we see a stack of phonics worksheet where they sort the sounds for "P". These activities will typically last that group two weeks because we also do hands on activities/games/sorts, etc that don't require paper/pencil. When I notice a folder getting emptier, I use my teacher prep time to makes copies, find leveled books to put in there, etc. 

These folders could also make it easy to take anecdotal notes for students. Here are the anecdotal note pages I use for my guided reading groups. 

Anecdotal Notes for Guided Reading

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