Teaching Reading

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I’m a firm believer that no individual should be denied reading instruction. It’s a matter of meeting a student where he or she is at presently with literacy skills and then designing an individualized program to move forward from there. One researcher in Australia put it quite succinctly: Literacy is a human rights issue. Everyone [...]

So what’s not to love about the word ‘free’ when it’s attached to quality activities and worksheets??
I believe that language development and reading proficiency are very closely related, so it stands to reason that I have a great deal of respect and love for my speech/language therapist-colleagues.  I found this site through StumbleUpon, and it [...]

Reading Pathways, by Dolores G. Hiskes, offers a wealth of reading fluency exercises.  Through the use of ‘pyramids,’ students are led through a series of increasingly difficult readings.  The lessons begin with the short A sound and continue through polysyllabic words such as effervescent and panorama.
Each lesson starts with a ’sounding out’ activity where students [...]