Guided Reading for Diverse needs

The article that I read for guided reading this week was called The Guided reading approach: a practical method to address diverse needs in the classroom, by Laura Schaffer and Barbara Schirmer.  In this article they talk about using guided reading to address diversity in the classroom.  The authors of the article are from the Michigan School for the Deaf.  The way they modified guided reading was to ask their students to read using story signs, pre-teaching vocabulary, and retelling in American Sign Language.  This school was also an English bilingual school, so they used guided reading lessons to help students know the differences between the two languages.  Small group instruction was really emphasized in this article.  When working in a small group teachers are able to select the appropriate text for the students to read.  In the first year of using guided reading the school focused on building word recognition skills and later moved on to focusing on comprehension and fluency.  This school used running records as a way to determine a child's instructional reading level.  I thought that this article was helpful because as a future teacher I will have children in my classroom with different needs.  This article shows ways that you can help students with disabilities using guided reading.