How to Match Books to Students and Engage Struggling Readers
Use an information reading interest survey to match books to students, build motivation, and support striving readers One of the simplest ways to grow readers is to match books to their interests. Not just what they say they like, but what their answers reveal about how they read, what they can handle, and what’s getting […]
Fluency: The Missing Piece
Help older readers build fluency and boost comprehension with practical strategies for addressing accuracy, phrasing, expression, and reading rate. Discover common fluency errors, how to assess them, and age-appropriate tools designed for middle school students.
Supercharge Interventions with Executive Functioning Support
No reading skill – from decoding and fluency to comprehension – can be successful without the use of executive functioning skills. When older readers struggle, weak executive functioning skills are often to blame. What we know about executive functioning Executive functioning (EF) has gained attention over the last few decades as its effect on learning […]
Teaching Nonfiction Text Structures to Older Students
5 easy steps to move students beyond graphic organizers But first… If you read our last blog post about nonfiction text structures, you already know where to begin – teaching and practicing the identification of each structure separately. As a reminder, we separate them into seven components: Download this and all pages from this post […]
Choosing and Preparing Texts for Striving Readers
Two steps help you select and prepare texts for use with striving readers!
Poetry Love!
Reading and writing poetry is essential for our struggling readers. It may be a “forgotten genre” in the academic standards, but its use in literacy has incredible benefits for our striving students. In reading, fluency and comprehension are the benefactors of its use, and in writing, organization and communication benefit. Here are some ways to […]
Celebrate Literacy All Year
with this literary calendar for middle school and high school! Do you think of a focus word each new year? This year, our word is preparation. We don’t mean the preparation of lesson plans – we mean the preparation for fun! How many times have we been halfway through the day only to read a […]
Four Steps to Scaffold Written Response
Help your striving readers craft written responses to text Written responses seem to be the trend, including within state assessments. But how do we move our striving readers and writers to a point that they can express their thoughts, support them with text, and discuss them with others? After all, the purposes of written response […]
Reading and Listening Comprehension
The link that matters! When we think of striving readers, we must expand our support to listening and reading comprehension. Hit the Repeat button! If you think your students aren’t listening to you, you’re probably right! Did you know that the human auditory brain structure is not fully mature until about 15 years old? That means […]
Moving from Concrete to Abstract Understanding in Reading
Help students move from concrete to abstract thinking in literacy with everyday objects! Through tangible items and analogies, concepts become more clear for students!
