Spend your limited budget making your literacy instruction more efficient and effective with this curated list!

Districts spend millions of dollars on bloated literacy programs that make promises about student success when used “with fidelity.” Of course to follow these “with fidelity,” you’d have to use 360 of your precious instructional minutes each day and all of your students would have to have the same needs.

But what if your students could improve their reading skills in a fraction of that time and enjoy doing it? That’s the benefit of using hands-on, engaging materials – even at the secondary level and especially at the intervention level. These materials can augment your packaged program to fill gaps quickly, or they can be used to create a full, budget-friendly program.

How do you know which items to choose?

While this post contains affiliate links, everything listed below is exactly what we’ve used to create reading manipulatives that have engaged our struggling readers for years. We specifically design our downloadable resources to be printed and used with these materials. (Want to skip the narrative and just see the lists? Head to our Amazon Storefront!)

Printing our resources on these items means you have effective instructional materials in a fraction of the time with a fraction of the effort!

I often joked that my right arm was much more developed than my left from my time at the paper cutter. You can avoid that dilemma and create your literacy manipulatives in just a few moments using perforated papers. Here are our favorites:

Perforated Paper

We use this third-size perforated paper for phrases, clauses, and other sentence parts. The template in our Freebie Library means you can type, download, and print on these in a matter of minutes! Here’s exactly how we use it to support comprehension at the sentence level:

1. Locate the longest sentence in the passage you’ll be using or choose a sentence that contains a feature on which your students need practice, such as appositives.
2. Determine the word groups, or where you’ll split the text. With longer sentences that contain many articles and adjectives, two or three word groups is better. In general, the larger the group of words, the easier the sentence construction. If you’re working with dependent and independent clauses, divide with those in mind, and include conjunctions separately, requiring students to choose the correct conjunction to complete the sentence.
3. Type the word groups in separate sections on the template. Omit the ending punctuation and the beginning capital letter, unless that word is a proper noun. If your students will be separating the perforated sheets, do not type the word groups in order.
4. Download and print as many copies as needed. I prefer partner or small group work, so I print enough for each set of students.
5. If you are separating the sections instead of the students, do so mindfully, so that groups do not have duplicate pages.
6. If you use literacy stations, store the sentence parts in a long envelope labeled with a number or letter that matches a key; do not label the envelope with the sentence. After creating the sentence, students can refer to the key to check their work.

These quarter-size perforated postcards are perfect for our sorting resources, some of our most effective reading manipulatives. We use the heavy paper version for more durability through the years with these engaging literacy resources:

• test question stems sorting
• text genre sorts

Last, but far from least, the perforated business cards reign supreme for fast manipulative generation! We love printing our reading manipulatives on these, then separating them for immediate use – no paper cutter required! The white ones are versatile, but we use the colored ones occasionally, too. This yellow set is one of the many colors available.

Print these resources on business cards:

• fluency phrases
• all syllable cards
• flip game cards
• vowel practice cards

Anything printed on the business cards can also be made into white board manipulatives with these peel and stick magnets.

Easy Literacy Manipulative Storage

Reading intervention materials must be easy to store and easy to find. One benefit of using business card materials is that there are many products designed specifically for that size.

We keep a set of syllable cards in business card holder sheets and placed in binders labeled with the type of syllable. When students complete syllable fluency reads, they simply grab a binder and flip the pages. A bonus is that the pages can be folded in half vertically, providing less visual stimuli to the reader.

Another favorite form of storage for business card resources are these plastic playing card boxes. They stack neatly in drawers and take up little room.

When the materials are larger, we use these and these board game storage containers. All of our materials are labeled using the label maker with varying sizes, found in our Amazon store.

These are just a few of the ways we use to take advantage of materials that make reading manipulative preparation FAST and EASY! Like and follow the HuddleTeach Amazon storefront from growing lists of reading-specialist and student-approved materials!

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