Syntax Success: Why Sentence Structure Matters for Older Struggling Readers

The covert piece often missing in reading intervention Many middle and high school students can read the words on a page but still struggle to understand what they just read. The problem isn’t always vocabulary or decoding. Sometimes, the biggest obstacle is syntax. If students cannot make sense of how words fit together in a […]

Phonological Awareness and Phonics: Why Older Struggling Readers Might Still Need Both

Addressing the skills your older struggling readers may have missed Many middle and high school teachers do not have a background that would help them define the words “phonological awareness” and “phonics.” If they do know them, they may picture elementary classrooms with alphabet charts, picture cards, and beginning readers. Even more, they assume those […]

Breaking Big Words: Why Decoding Still Belongs in Secondary Intervention

Helping older students crack the code If you ask secondary teachers about decoding, many will immediately think of young readers sounding out simple words. By middle and high school, we often assume students have moved beyond those skills and are ready to focus on comprehension. But for many older struggling readers, decoding is still an […]

Reading Fluency for Older Struggling Readers

What Secondary Teachers Need to Know When people hear the word “fluency,” they often picture elementary students racing through leveled readers while a teacher counts words per minute. By middle and high school, many ELAR teachers don’t even think about fluency. If they hear a student stumble while reading aloud, they may assume the student […]

How to Match Books to Students and Engage Struggling Readers

Blog graphic for How to Match Books to Students and depicts a middle-school age female selecting a white book from a wooden shelf in a brightly lit library.

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 […]