ABSTRACT
A balanced literacy curriculum consists of five interrelated components: reading books to children, independent reading, shared reading, writing about reading, and guided reading. The learning is facilitated by a responsive teacher who creates opportunities that build on children’s background knowledge while simultaneously engaging their minds in problem-solving strategies that lead to the construction of new knowledge. The children in Beth’s transitional guided reading group already know a lot about word patterns. The teacher must determine whether the child used a strategy to help herself make predictions and confirm or reject the predictions based on other information. The goal of teaching is to help children pick up cues (sensory information) from the environment, integrate these sources with existing information, and construct new knowledge. A reader who is reading independently is attending to many sources of information—or cues—in the text: Meaning, or semantic, cues; structural, or syntactical, system; graphophonetic cues; and pragmatic cues.
