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To help your child improve his or her reading skills, teachers use what is known as reading levels to help create guided reading curriculum's. Each reading level has a set of books that are specifically geared towards improving different reading skills and comprehension, depending in part on the child's age. If you would like to use summer vacation to help your child get a head start, his or her teacher should be able to provide you with the list ahead of time. This can help you create your own guided reading curriculum.

The guided reading curriculum become slightly more advanced with each passing school year. The hope is that when the child graduates from the sixth grade, they will have acquired a large set of reading comprehension skills. These skills will help them succeed in middle school, high school, and beyond. Here are a few examples of what a good guided reading curriculum should strive to teach.

Kindergarten

As the child begins learning to read and enters school for the first time, they begin with a guided reading curriculum meant to impart the basics of reading. The books use sentences that may be only two or three words, and each of these words tends to be four or fewer letters. Such examples as 'See Spot Run' may be memories from your childhood, and are still popular favorites in a kindergarten guided reading curriculum.

The goal of these books is to teach children the sounds that the different letters make, and to help them understand how these sounds change as the letters are strung together. Often they employ rhyming words to help reinforce the patterns. A young child's guided reading curriculum has the primary goal of providing the building blocks of language.

First Grade

As first graders begin to progress, the guided reading curriculum will begin to introduce slightly more advanced skills. It often begins with learning the difference between nouns and verbs, and builds upon the skills learned in kindergarten. These stories may also be more advanced, containing longer sentences and plots where the characters interact more frequently.

Second Grade

The more advanced second grade guided reading curriculum finds children more able to answer questions about the stories they have read. Their reading comprehension has advanced, as well as their retention of the material. Many children this age even begin to read short chapter books.

While a guided reading curriculum is generally created for a specific age group, it is important to assess where a particular student is and find appropriate material for their level. Students with a lower comprehension should be approached with material to help meet their needs, without making them feel inadequate. This is also important for students with learning disabilities. It may be helpful to use a guided reading curriculum that has advanced stories told in a simple, building block format in cases like these.

If you understand your child's reading level and guided reading curriculum, you can help them meet their educational goals and spend quality time with them.