What Do You Need for
Teaching Reading

Teaching reading, teaching phonics, or teaching reading comprehension can be daunting! You’ll find great tips to get your reading program off and running.

Chances are you are a new elementary school teacher who needs a few starter ideas.

Or perhaps you teach older students and realize you have to help your students read and comprehend better in your content area.

Let’s look at some ways to jumpstart your reading program

For starters, no matter what grade you teach, begin with your state standards, grade level benchmarks, and other standardized assessment results required for your school. Find your students’ areas of strength and need, allowing those skills to be your instructional guide.

Then, keep in mind the 5 components of good reading instruction, according to the 2000 National Reading Panel Report:

• Phonemic Awareness
• Phonics
• Vocabulary
• Comprehension
• Fluency

In order for teachers to be successful at teaching reading, The National Reading Panel suggests that teachers provide:

• More time on task
• More structure and routines
• More background knowledge
• Lots of practice
• Feedback

In my school, our students’ biggest deficit is in their background knowledge. This is pretty common in the lower income schools. It’s also common for students who have trouble reading at any grade level.

BEGINNING READING ACTIVITIES

The use of language is the beginning of reading. Children begin to notice, think about, and work with individual sounds in spoken words.

•Phonemic Awareness Activities
Children learn to understand that words are made up of speech sounds, or phonemes. Use lots of game playing with words and sounds, songs, rhymes, and rhythm.

• Phonics
Integrate this with phonemic awareness activities. Use letters and their sounds as you play the word games.

• Surround children with pictures

• Take lots of field trips. Even walk outside or around the building. Use as much language to talk about everything they see.

• Build as much background knowledge with experiences. Talk about and write down what children have seen or experienced. Read it back or create books about these experiences.

• Provide fun books on tape. Teach children how to turn pages with the beeps. Have nursery rhyme songs on tape.

• Read aloud. Teach children concepts of print, such as how to treat a book, where you start, how to turn pages. Point to the words as you read. Always mention these things briefly as you read books together.

KINDERGARTEN READING, 1st GRADE READING, and TEACHING PHONICS

Basic Materials for Teaching Reading

• Upper and lower case letter sets. You can have a variety, from different sizes to ones made of materials for a tactile experience.

• Magnetic letters and cookie sheets or magnetic boards.

• Dry erase boards.

• Pans of sand for finger tracing of letters

• Play dough for letter formation

• Letter stamps and ink pads for ink stamping

• A writing center with paper, pencils, markers, and some of the letters. Include words and letters to copy or trace.

• Alphabet games

• Sound games

• Spinners and dice

• Pictures for sorting (sort into categories, beginning sounds, ending sounds, rhyming, etc.)

• Word sorts

• Templates or mats for sorting pictures, letters, or words

• Chart paper

• Notebooks and manila folders for word study
• Alphabet books

• Easy phonics books

• Big books

• Rhyming dictionary

• Student dictionaries

• Class library/reading center or area

• Pointers for teacher and children

• Listening center with headphones, tape/CD player, books or song sheets with recordings

• Puppets, dolls, or other ways to retell stories

• Label everything in your room

Activities for Teaching Reading

Use lots of ways to do repeated readings as well as retell stories, such as:

• Shared Reading

This is when the teacher reads from a book and interacts with the children. Together, they read, analyze words, and discuss the pictures and what is happening. I recommend a book called Perspectives on Shared Reading ,by Bobbi Fisher and Emily Fisher Medvic. As you share the book, teach concepts of print, such as left to right, top to bottom, what is a word, what is a letter, punctuation, front cover, back cover, how to turn pages properly, where to begin reading, etc.

• Guided Reading

• Paired Reading

Pair a stronger reader with a weaker, or an adult with a child.

• Choral Reading

This a reading fluency activity designed for repeated readings.

• Choral Singing
Always include the words for everyone on the board or overhead. Point to the words as you sing. Remember “follow the bouncing ball”? This is great for fluency!

• Tape Assisted Reading

• Reading Conversations

• Reading Journals

• Book Review/Sharing Chart

• Word Study

• Independent Reading

• Board Games

• Writing Center

ELEMENTARY READING ACTIVITIES

Basic Materials

• Classroom library with books, books and more books. Have at least 50% of the books be non-fiction. Provide books below, at, and above grade level. Include graphic novels, magazines, scripts, popular music lyrics, and anything fun or interesting to read. If your budget is thin, search for grants or places where you might find gently used books. The post office in our area conducts a book drive and donates to a place where teachers can pick up 1 book per student each month. It’s a great deal!

• Lots of read aloud books

• Student dictionaries

• Reader’s Theater scripts

• Games that involve reading

• Pointers or book marks for tracking and covering lines of text
We cut rectangular pieces of transparency and then use a light- colored permanent marker to draw a line on the edge. Students use the line over or under the line of text. The transparency allows them to see the rest of the paragraph in case they need to reread.

• Post-it notes for text-coding

• Comfortable reading area (perhaps pillows, lamp, cushy chair, etc.)
You could have several reading nooks for smaller groups of children.

• Listening center with headphones, tape/CD player, books or song sheets with recordings

• Letters or word parts in order to manipulate sounds for word analysis

These can be used for independent word analysis or group work.

• Overhead or whiteboard for showing poems or songs for choral reading

• Anything to touch that promotes background knowledge, like models of planets or statues of historic people

Materials for Walls

• Fill the walls with interesting posters and pictures that promote background knowledge.

• Graphs, charts, and tables

• Maps

• Label items in your room to benefit your ELL students.

Activities for Teaching Reading


• Independent Reading

Giving students reading choice is most effective in promoting motivation. Motivation is a top factor in reading success.
• Teacher/Adult Read Aloud

• Shared Reading

• Guided Reading

• Paired Reading

• Choral Reading

• Choral Singing

• Tape Assisted Reading

• Reading Conversations

Teaching reading includes teaching the art of conversation, but it takes lots of modeling, time, and patience. I recommend a book called Knee to Knee, Eye to Eye: Circling in on Comprehension ,by Ardith Davis Cole.

• Reading Journals

• Book Review/Sharing Chart

• Word Study
When teaching reading, it’s so important to look at print detail, sight words, letter-sound association and the alphabetic principle.

Concentrate on phonemic awareness, decoding by analogy, and how to use both context and phonics clues.

• Independent Reading

• Board Games

• Writing Center

MIDDLE SCHOOL and TEACHING READING COMPREHENSION

Basic Materials

• No matter what subject you teach, provide lots of books in a wide range of reading levels. Include fiction and non-fiction in a wide variety of interests.

• Content area reading materials at LOWER levels. Deliver your content with something other than the textbook, especially to your lower skilled readers. For instance, if you teach the Civil War, borrow some books from the library with lots of pictures and written in easy language. (Use your elementary school libraries, too.) Did you know that textbooks are often written up to 2 grade levels above your grade level? Yikes! No wonder so many of your average to low student readers have trouble!

• Provide other reading and writing mediums, such as magazines, poems, letters, song lyrics, journal entries, scripts, dictionaries, drawing paper

• Graphic organizers

• Computers for reading interesting sites

• Post-it notes for text coding

• Listening center for books and tapes/CDs

Activities for Teaching Reading Comprehension

• Independent Reading
This should be at students’ independent reading level and materials should be chosen by students.Giving students reading choice is most effective in promoting motivation. Motivation is a top factor in reading success.

• Teacher/Adult Read Aloud
Before you say, “They’re too old for this,” please reconsider. I have read aloud to high school students to model fluent reading, to get them to think aloud and orally discuss, to work on listening comprehension, and to model good reading comprehension strategies. Even picture books work great for introducing a topic, summarizing a theme, or even learning to appreciate the art in a book.

• Activate background knowledge
Use anticipation guides, picture books, or questions you give students upon entering the room.

• Shared Reading

• Guided Reading
Some middle schools are using guided reading in their literacy or language arts blocks. Leveled reading texts are used with flexible groups that depend on skill and group goals.

• Paired Reading
You can pair fluent readers with less fluent, older students with younger, or adults with students. Paired reading is often used to help support the less skilled readers.

• Choral Reading
These can be fun and effective reading fluency activities for teaching reading comprehension.

• Choral Singing
Again, this is great for teaching reading fluency. It includes all students and really supports the lower and shyer readers.

• Tape Assisted Reading
Here’s another great staple, especially for your struggling readers and ELL students. Recordings shouldn’t have music, so you can make the recordings yourself, if you wish!

• Reading Conversations
Whatever you do, get your students talking to each other about what they’re reading. Some of you use literature circles. Some of you use book club. Make groups small, or some students will never open up and talk. Don’t expect kids to do this without modeling and training. Give them time to develop the skill for conversations, and by fourth quarter, you’ll be pleasantly surprised!

• Reading Journals
These don’t just have to be personal. The journal can be a written dialog between students. If they are just personal, make sure that you dialog with them in the journal. Share your comments, but don’t focus on the grammatical and mechanical mistakes. You want to promote comprehension with the written thought process. Use the journals to learn what kind of mechanics the students need to work on.

• Book Review/Sharing Chart
Keep a book recommendation chart up in the room. Leave room for students to write the title, author, praises, and criticisms. Check thumbs up or thumbs down. Make sure students look at the chart each week.

• Word Study
Word study includes spelling, grammar, and reading suffixes and prefixes. Let students manipulate letter and word part tiles. Words Their Way is an excellent source for word lists and ideas. Remember to use words from the texts students read. Make it authentic and connected.

• Board Games

• Reading comprehension activities and strategies
Teach questioning, inferring, predicting, visualizing, self-monitoring, looking back, evaluating, connecting the known to the unknown, and summarizing.

• Vocabulary building is a part of teaching reading. Build word meaning by categorizing words and using context to figure out word meanings.

• Use post-it notes or sticky arrows and a journal in order to text code. This is a kind of annotation where students learn to question, clarify, or confirm what they already know about something. Students can put a ‘?’ when they don’t know something or have a question, a ‘!’ when they see something they already know, and a ‘+’ when they are reading brand new information. This is one of those metacognition exercises to get students to think about their thinking when you're teaching reading comprehension!

HIGH SCHOOL and TEACHING READING COMPREHENSION

If you are a high school teacher, you know that some of your students have pretty low reading ability. Even if you teach a content area, it’s imperative that you help your students read better, so you must be teaching reading at the same time.

Basic Materials

• Informative posters, maps, graphs, and charts on the walls to activate background knowledge or provide more background

• Books at a variety of reading levels.
Augment your textbooks (which are often at or above the grade level in reading level) with library materials at least 2 levels below grade level.

• Tapes, journals, letters, websites

• Graphic organizers.
Use just a few over and over. Students need to become adept and comfortable with the organizer form in order to imprint the organization into their brains. Don’t keep using different types of organizers.

• Journals for interactive written dialog between students

• Drawing materials for the visual and creative learners

• Technical equipment for audio-visual projects

• Post-it notes

Activities for Teaching Reading Comprehension

• For your more advanced students, have them learn the art of detailed annotation in the margins of their books that they own.

• Choice, choice, choice! Give students lots of materials in order to deliver the content or your reading goals. Choice is a number 1 motivator, and motivation is strongly linked to reading success. (Believe me, you won’t get very far by making your struggling readers try and read your favorite book from your college years, and then give them an essay answer pop quiz! I’ve actually seen this happen. Ouch!)

• Teach text-coding using post-it notes for your other students. See the section under middle school, above.

• Use book club model or literature circles for teaching reading comprehension. Employ as much small group conversation as possible. Teach students how to have effective dialog with respect for others’ opinions.

• Use graphic organizers to teach text structure or to assist them in summarizing and note-taking. It’s important to stick with a single graphic organizer over a period of time. This helps teach a certain text structure or skill and ingrain it into the mind. Directly teach them the structure and skill, too. Don’t teach covertly! Tell them what you’re doing and model it.

• Teach reading comprehension strategies like questioning, inferring, predicting, visualizing, self-monitoring, looking back, evaluating, connecting the known to the unknown, and summarizing.

• Vocabulary building is a part of teaching reading. Build word meaning by categorizing words and using context to figure out word meanings as well as themes.

• Purchase a book like Classroom Strategies for Interactive Learning , by Doug Buehl. This book is full of fun and interesting ways to help students become independent learners. It’s got everything from graphic organizers with suggested activities, to ways of studying point of view.

• Use pre-reading strategies when teaching reading, like the Frayer Model.
This is a graphic organizer that has four squares for recording information related to a concept. It can later be used for note-taking and as a study guide.

• Try a RAFT strategy.
This stands for ROLE (role of the writer, as in Who Are You?), AUDIENCE (To whom are you writing?), FORMAT (What form will your writing assume?), TOPIC (What are you writing about?). Use this to help with student writing. It helps students use imagination, creativity, and motivation. It teaches various points of view and helps students analyze what they’ve read. It can be used in science, history, or literature.

There is a lot of information out there for teaching reading, and this is just the tip of the iceberg! Keep visiting me while I continue to add more to what I hope is an informative and helpful website!


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