What is reading? And what are the core skills that young children need to become successful readers? Learning to read is complex, but this overview can help explain key terms and demystify the process.
There are a number of current informal reading inventories — each has its strengths, limitations, and unique characteristics, which should be considered in order to best fit a teacher’s needs.
It’s not an easy thing, learning to read. This article provides a brief overview of what is involved and what parents, teachers, and everyone else who touches the life of a child can do to help those who struggle.
Paired reading is a strategy to help students build fluency by reading aloud to each other. More fluent readers can be paired with less fluent readers, or children who read at the same level can be paired to reread a story.
Learn about the “writing rope” — a model for understanding the interwoven elements that support writing, developed by literacy expert Joan Sedita. Get the basics on the five key strands and how to provide explicit instruction for each strand.
Learn about the “writing rope” — a new model for understanding the interwoven elements that support writing. Get the basics on the five key strands and how to provide explicit instruction for each strand.
Choral reading is a teaching strategy that enhances reading skills and promotes fluency. In choral reading, a group of students reads a text together in unison, with the teacher often leading the way.
It’s not an easy thing, learning to read and write. Discover what it takes to build important literacy skills, and how you can help your children grow as readers, writers, and thinkers!
School administrators have a critical leadership role to play in helping students become good readers. This article suggests seven key action steps on how principals and other administrators can create a school framework for success.
Learn more about the four types of reading assessments: universal screeners, diagnostic tests, progress monitoring tools, and summative assessments. It’s important to begin by asking yourself: “What do I want to know about my students? What do I want to assess?”
Children take their first critical steps toward learning to read and write very early in life. Long before they can exhibit reading and writing production skills, they begin to acquire some basic understandings of the concepts about literacy and its functions.
Reading is a multifaceted process involving word recognition, comprehension, fluency, and motivation. Learn how readers integrate these facets to make meaning from print.
Before children learn to read print, they need to become aware of how the sounds in words work. They must understand that words are made up of individual speech sounds, or phonemes. A child’s skill in phonological and phonemic awareness is a good predictor of later reading success or difficulty.
ELLs can benefit from Reader’s Theater activities in a number of ways, including fluency practice, comprehension, engaging in a story, and focusing on vocal and physical expression. Kristina Robertson offers a number of approaches to Reader’s Theater with ELLs in this article.
This paper presents six principles designed to prevent writing difficulties as well as to build writing skills: (a) providing effective writing instruction, (b) tailoring instruction to meet the individual needs,(c) intervening early, (d) expecting that each child will learn to write, (e) identifying and addressing roadblocks to writing, and (f) employing technologies.
Many teachers will be using supplemental phonics and word-recognition materials to enhance reading instruction for their students. In this article, the authors provide guidelines for determining the accessibility of these phonics and word recognition programs.
Providing small-group reading instruction in five core reading elements (phonological awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension) can really help English language learners in the elementary grades.
