Teaching Reading

One of the best resources I’ve found for beginning readers, especially older beginning readers, is environmental print. Look around your home or place of business, or your neighborhood or on your commute and you will see loads of letters and words. If you can make the connection in your reader’s mind between the skills being learned and the words he or she sees every day, you have instant motivational tools.

Here are just a few ways to use environmental print:

• Find target letters
• Tell the sounds that words begin with
• Locate words that are familiar or recognizable
• Find words that have specific phonics attributes, such as long A’s or ending with T
• Find words that match each other, such as ’stop’ on a sign and ’stop’ on a billboard
• Copy a word or words from the environment and then use that word in a sentence
• Make a list of words from the environment and sort them later into appropriate categories

Use your imagination!  You can create all sorts of activities using environmental print.

As students get to more advanced material, the focus of studying moves to reading, comprehending and recalling material that has been read from textbooks, articles or other material. One way to build comprehension power is to teach students to summarize.

Summarizing involves pulling the important points from reading material, organizing them, and paraphrasing them in a shorter form. Practice helps! So do examples. Provide your reading student with lots of examples and then challenge him or her to summarize information from longer sentences to paragraphs to entire articles.

I’ve been wanting to do this for a very long, long time! I’ve started podcasting! If you’re not familiar with the concept, it means that I’m posting regular recordings for you to listen to online or download to your Ipod. These are about different ways to help your child be a better reader, and they’re short and sweet. You can check it out at sandyfleming.podbean.com.

Have you tried cloze technique to build reading comprehension?  The idea is simple: Efficient readers actually don’t read every word in a passage.  They make predictions and then check their expectations against the text that is actually there.  The more effective the predictions, the less frequently the reader needs to stop and actually decode the text.  In the cloze technique, words are actually left out of the passage.  If the reader is comprehending well, the blanks are easily filled in with correct words.  Make the task more or less difficult by adjusting the frequency of the blanks or by choosing the words to leave out.  You can also offer a word bank with correct choices to insert in each blank spot.

Cloze activities help students with their prediction strategies.  They can also be used as a measure of comprehension.  The method is easy to implement; you simply need a passage of text that is at the level of difficulty that you wish to assess or work with.  Retype the passage, leaving a blank in place of the words you choose to omit.  Some activities work well by omitting every nth word (8th or 10th, for example).  Other passages lend themselves to omission of nouns or verbs.

Cloze exercises are also a great way to help students prepare for tests and quizzes over given reading material.  By filling in the missing words, readers must process and comprehend the text, making it easier to recall for the upcoming quiz.

Want to build reading comprehension skills?  One fun tool is the mini-mystery.  These go by assorted names, and they come in books and on websites, but the general idea is that they present a little mystery story in just a few paragraphs, complete with clues for the solving.  A careful reader can pick up on the clues and find the right answer, making them great tools for reading for detail.

Mini-mysteries come in all levels of difficulty, from about the fourth grade level on up.  Sometimes they are called Minute Mysteries, too.

One of my favorite sites for younger children is http://kids.mysterynet.com/.  The mysteries here are pitched at a lower reading level, and the clues are generally pretty obvious, even for beginners.  If you’re looking for more of a challenge, try http://www.mysterynet.com/.  These mysteries are a bit tougher and written at higher reading levels.

Enjoy!

Phonics instruction, especially, lends itself to practice using the Bingo format.  Make a blank Bingo board, and then duplicate it to your heart’s content.  When you want to make a new Bingo game, just grab the blanks and start creating.  I’ve made Bingo boards to review sight words, to practice vowel sounds, go over letter recognition, and to work with beginning or ending sounds.

Bingo is fun to use in nearly any educational setting.  You can set up a game to play with one or more students.  You can cover the squares using small tokens or color them in with markers.  You can allow students to ‘win’ when they get a line covered, cover four corners, or even fill up the entire card.

It’s quick and it’s easy, so why  not incorporate some Bingo games into your routine?  Leave me a comment and let me know what variations you use with your students/children.

If you teach in an elementary classroom or run a summer or after school program that teaches reading, you’ll want to listen up!  I’ve got a nine-issue series of a duplicate-able newsletter designed to help parents understand how to support teachers as they teach reading.  It’s called “The Parents’ Guide to Reading,” and it makes an outstanding resource to hand out to your families.

You can subscribe to receive the pdf files once a month for nine months for just $5-a price nearly any program can afford.  Or, if you’d like to get the set all at once, the cost is only $15-still less than $2 per issue.    Best of all, there’s a free sample issue available! All you need to do is visit Free Sample: Parents’ Guide to Reading and sign right up.  You’ll be sent your free sample issue as quickly as you confirm the email.

Here’s a teaching method that can be a life-saver for teachers working with struggling students, limited resources, or unmotivated pupils.  Language Experience is a broad term that basically means that each student’s own language is used as a basis for teaching reading and language arts skills.

The basic idea is this: If a student can put an idea into words, it can be written down.  If an idea is written down, the student can read it back.  If the student can read it, others can read it as well.  Language Experience allows students to experience printed language that relates directly to their lives and thus is the most meaningful kind of language there is.

The original idea dates back to a book called “The Language Experience Approach to the Teaching of Reading” by Russell G. Stauffer.  That book is no longer in print, but used copies might still be available from Amazon and similar sellers.  Another book to check out is “The Writing Road to Reading” by Romalda Spaulding.

The basic idea is that children can generally read what they have just said, so if you write down the child’s words as dictated, then provide them a copy of those words, they can begin to make the connection between spoken and printed thoughts.  You can take it a step farther by using their own generated language to practice phonics or other specific reading skills.

I’ve found that the method has a lot of validity, and really helps some students to make reading connections.  It’s also a godsend for programs with extremely tight budgets-all you really need to use it is paper and pencil and a willing able writer to take dictation.  Give it a try!

Reading comprehension is one of the most talked-about topics in this arena, so I’m always on the lookout for outstanding articles about comprehension. You’ll want to check out Seven Strategies To Teach Students Text Comprehension over at Reading Rockets. This article does an outstanding job of outlining ways in which reading comprehension can break down and how teachers can help students learn strategies to improve comprehension.  The article is a summary of information from C.R. Adler’s book, and includes many concrete strategies useful for students of all ages.  There are also some fabulous links to printable graphic organizers, which help many students learn to read for meaning.  Check it out!

We don’t often think of it, but the season of caroling is wonderful for beginning readers.  Singing the familiar songs while looking at the words is a great way to reinforce early reading skills.  The words are often even broken up into syllables, since we sing one syllable for each note in general.  What a great tool for learning word analysis skills!