5 Ways to Get Your Students Reading to Boost Achievement!

Are your students reading 15 minutes a day? If not they should be! Research shows that 

reading for 15 minutes a day makes all the difference between a successful student and a struggling student. But why 15 minutes?

 

Importance of Reading

A study comparing the engaged reading time and reading scores of more than 2.2 million students found that students who were reading 15 minutes a day or more got a higher reading score than the national average. Growth in a student's reading skills only happens when that student reads for at least 15 minutes a day. 

In this same study it was found that students who read less than 5 minutes a day saw the lowest level of growth in their reading scores. Their scores were also well below the national reading average. Students who read between 5 and 14 minutes per day did a little better, but their scores were also below the national average. “15 minutes seems to be the ‘magic number’ at which students start seeing substantial positive gains in reading achievement.” Renaissance

 

Reading Linked to Student Success in School 

According to a study of the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) scores of over 174,000 students around the world, there is a connection between a student’s reading practice and performance. Talentnook

So what is the difference between a student who reads for less than 15 minutes a day and a student who reads for more than 30 minutes a day? It can’t be that big of a difference, right? Wrong. There is actually a huge difference. The difference is 12 million.

By the time a student graduates high school, a student reading for 30 minutes or more a day will encounter 13.7 million words. And the number of words their classmates who aren’t reading 15 minutes a day will encounter? 1.5 million words. It is so important that our students are reading 15 minutes per day because it will greatly impact their success and achievement in school. 

SO WHAT SHOULD YOU DO WITH THIS INFORMATION?!

1. Encourage Reading in Your Classroom, in any way or form.  

It is so important that we encourage our students to read. Some of the ways we can do this is to invite them to reread, or read it again and again. Rereading builds speed and accuracy and helps students gain confidence in their reading skills.

For our youngest readers, teaching them that reading the pictures is also a form of reading. This will help them to feel capable of reading and begin a love for reading at an early age.

2. Teach Students to Find Just Right Books

Teaching students to find books that are a good fit is also extremely important. If students are reading books that are too difficult for them and/or not of interest, that is surely a way to discourage them from wanting to read more. By teaching them how to properly shop for books, we can help to build that love of reading.

When teaching students to book shop, have them open up a book and read through a few paragraphs. Can they read and understand most of the words? Is it too easy? Does what they are reading interest them? Is the type of book interesting to them?

If so- this is a good fit. If not, they can return it and find a new one. I also like to let students know that it's totally okay to start a book and decide that you don't like it.

 3. Organize Your Class Library to Make Book Shopping Easy

 Let's be honest- finding books in a library are rather difficult if you are just browsing and don't have a specific author or title in mind. I believe it's important to organize your own classroom library so that it's easy for students to find books they love reading. We don't wan't students to get discouraged from reading because it's too difficult to find a book!

Book bins are a great way to keep books organized and the best thing about it is that students can pull a bin out and easily look through to find a book they like. Students often check out books by looking at their covers. They are much more likely to pull out a book if they can see the cover versus just the spine.

The other great thing I love about the bins is that you can choose different ways to organize your books to make book shopping easier for students. In my own classroom library, I had my books sorted out by popular chapter series, favorite authors, and genre. This way, students could stick to the books they love, discover new books by their favorite author or even explore new books in their favorite genres. You can grab my library book bin labels here.

 

 

4. Host a Book Drive 

Another great way to make books accessible to students is to host a book drive at your school!

If you have never heard of a book drive, it is where students bring in gently used books and swap them out for a new one. The great thing about a book drive is that it provides new books to students and also makes reading more accessible to those who may not have books at home. It also helps to encourage reading at home. I held one at my school a few years ago and it was a total hit!

 

To ensure book swap inventory stayed up, I required children to swap for the same type of book they brought in (chapter book for chapter book and picture book for picture book). To keep track, when kids came to give their books, they would get a colored ticket (indicating picture or chapter book). They could then choose however many books for the number of tickets they had. 

If you have any questions for me about hosting your own book swap, feel free to DM me over on Instagram @teachinginparadise. 

5. Make Time for Read Alouds, Daily

I know that as teachers, you are always strapped for time. However, research shows how important it is for students to be reading daily. By Incorporating read alouds into your school day you are modeling fluent reading for students, introducing them to new books and authors, and most importantly, helping them to find the joy in reading!

I love to use Read Alouds to introduce new concepts that we are learning about. It's a great way to throw in a fun picture book. 

In addition, during the month of December, we read 1 Christmas/Winter story a day. The kids are so excited and look forward to these daily holiday read alouds. You'd be surprised how many students are not read to at home on a daily basis. 

So, no matter how old your students are, they all love to be read to! I've seen 6th graders in our school library so excited to sit on the ground for our librarian to read to them!

If you're a 3rd grade teacher, get my list of favorite Gr.3 Read Alouds here.

As educators, we want to do all we can to ensure that our students are successful in school and later on in life. One of the best ways we can do this is to make books accessible and ensure that they are reading the magic number of 15 minutes a day.

 

Until next time.
Aloha,

Sources:

https://www.renaissance.com/2018/01/23/blog-magic-15-minutes-reading-practice-reading-growth/

https://talentnook.com/blog/the-15-minute-magic-elevate-your-childs-reading

A Deep Dive into The Big Five: How to Determine Reading Interventions

Last week, I shared with you all about The Big Five. Today we will take a deeper dive into WHY knowing and understanding The Big 5 is important in supporting your struggling readers.

Let's pretend that Henry is in the 3rd grade and he is struggling with reading comprehension. This might be your focus for intervention and small groups, right??

We need to take a deeper dive into WHY he is struggling with comprehension. Knowing about The Big Five will help you to determine specific interventions that your students may need.  Let's take a look at this example:

These are prompts we typically use with our students right? Can YOU tell me about what you just read? For many of our students, this is what the text is like when they are reading! It could be either due to the fact that they are unable to decode the word or possibly that they simply just don't know what the word means. Both of these issues lead to a breakdown in understanding. 

We need to refer back to The Big Five and think of it as a Hierarchy of Reading Skills. 

The reason why Henry is struggling with Comprehension is likely due to several different factors. For 3rd graders, their beginning of year oral reading fluency assessments can provide a lot of information. If your student's reading rate is way below grade-level expectations and/or their accuracy rate is low, it is highly likely that your student is struggling to decode the text. They are reading slowly (and with many errors) because they are spending most of their cognitive energy trying to figure out what each word is. Since their brain is focused on this, they are unable to comprehend the text. 
Analyzing the errors also helps you to determine what the student needs. Perhaps the student is unable to read-only multi-syllabic words. This tells you that your intervention will need to focus on decoding multi-syllabic words. 

Taking a step back to analyze each component of The Big Five is necessary for truly targeting your students' intervention needs. Continue to move one step back along the hierarchy to determine a starting point for interventions. 
I hope that this post was helpful to you! If you have any questions, I'd love to answer them for you! Send me a DM over on Instagram or Facebook!

The Big Five: Essential to Supporting Your Struggling Readers

Back when Response to Intervention (RTI) was a new buzzword in Education and our staff was getting initial PD on what RTI is and what we would be expected to do, I vividly remember asking “will there be training provided for HOW to deliver these research-based intervention strategies?” Not sure about your college program, but I was not trained to teach kids how to read. I taught myself strategies to get by to support my 3rd graders with what they needed to become successful readers. I once had a student that moved from another country and spoke very little English. I found myself spending hours on the internet trying to learn how to teach someone their letters, letter sounds, and how to blend. 

Fast forward a few years - I am in a different role as an instructional coach. I am so fortunate to have had the opportunity to attend many amazing PDs on reading. I’m happy to say that since that distant memory, our staff has been trained and now have tools in their belts to support struggling readers. Despite this,  I’m sure that there are many educators out there who are in the same boat I once was, so today I’d like to share with you a bit of what I’ve learned over the years. 

 

One big thing I learned was The Big Five, which was identified by the National Institute of Health and the National Reading Panel in a 2000 report. The Big Five refers to Phonological Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension. Together, these are the necessary components of quality, comprehensive reading instruction. A child who is competent in each of these aspects will likely be a good reader. 

 

So what is each of these components about, anyway? Rather than tackling the components alphabetically, let’s discuss The Big Five in terms of chronological order - starting with the component that appears first in a reader.

Phonemic Awareness involves listening. It is the ability to notice, think about, and work with individual sounds (phonemes) that make up words. 

Phonemic awareness develops in children between the ages of two and three. Imagine how much language a child hears in the first few years of life. ALL of this language goes into his or her development as a reader, and it all starts with phonemic awareness. 

 

This important building block involves listening and manipulating sounds. Although there are twenty-six letters in the alphabet, there are a total of forty phonemes (sounds) and two hundred fifty spellings (/f/, /ph/, /gh/). Sometimes it’s a bit tricky.

 

Some of the other components of phonemic awareness include hearing rhymes, producing rhymes, identifying initial, middle, and end sounds, blending sounds, and orally segmenting and blending words. 

 

The next component of The Big Five is phonics. So what is the difference between phonics and phonemic awareness? In short, phonemic awareness focuses more on hearing sounds while phonics targets the relationships between letters and sounds. 

 

In phonics, the reader will learn about consonants and vowels (and their sounds). Further, phonics includes vowel blends (diphthongs) like -oi- as in coin and consonant digraphs such as /th/ and /sh/. Consonant blends like /dr/ and /st/ are also part of phonics.

These terms can often be confusing for upper-grade teachers, so to break it down for you Consonant blends are when two sounds are blended together, each of those sounds can be heard in the blend. Consonant digraphs are when two consonants are together and they make only one sound. Typically, this sound is changed and you cannot hear their original sounds.

 

Here is a great visual for you from Malia over at Playdough to Plato.  She has this as a FREEBIE over on her blog. Click here to check it out.

Reading should sound like speaking. Many teachers use this simple explanation to describe fluency to their students. 

 

Fluency is the ability to read text accurately, quickly, and with proper expression. Fluency is the bridge from learning to read to reading to learn.

When a reader is fluent, he or she is bound to better comprehend the text. The reason for this is that when a reader is fluent, he or she can focus on the meaning of words rather than decoding every single one. Thus, comprehension improves.

 

Vocabulary is the key to comprehension. The more words a reader knows and understands, the more he or she will be able to read, thereby learning more new words. An insufficient vocabulary can slow down comprehension significantly. Parents and teachers can build vocabulary in children by talking with them and reading aloud.

 

The definition of comprehension is ‘intentional thinking during which meaning is constructed during interactions between text and reader’. The ultimate goal of reading comprehension is not possible without the other four components. 

 

Reading comprehension involves many factors, including background knowledge, vocabulary, working memory, and exposure to language. A good reader is always asking questions internally (‘why did the character do that?’ or ‘who is this new character?’) and makes connections to the text.

 

Seeing the light bulb go on in the mind of a reader, when he or she is just figuring it out, is the ultimate gift for a teacher. After breaking down the reading process into its building blocks, it’s no wonder that it also seems like a miracle! 

 

If you found this post helpful, be sure to follow me on Instagram and/or Facebook to be updated when new posts go live!! 

Click here to check out my next post in the series: How to determine reading interventions for your struggling readers.

Reading Wonders Weekly Teaching Plans

Hi, Friends!  Last year, I blogged about how I organized all of my Reading Wonders leveled readers and resources….Many people requested for me to share my weekly plans that I used to teach the series. Today, I am finally back to share that with you all! If you'd like to go back and check out that organization post, you can find that here.  When we first started using this program..I was just so overwhelmed by everything that needed to be done. The plans in the TE completely stressed me out because there was NO WAY I could do all of that in that amount of time. I'd like to think that I'm a pretty tech savvy kind of gal, but the online component also overwhelmed me. There was so much offered online, but I felt that things were just all over the place. To help myself out, I ended up creating resources for myself to use to teach each week. 

I created visual anchor charts so my students could refer back to the skills and strategies that are taught throughout the week. Also included in these packs are various worksheets to use throughout the week.

Creating these resources really helped me to know and understand what I was teaching each week. It forced me to read all the stories and understand the content I was teaching. I ended up creating a generic skeleton for my weekly plans. I mapped it out days 1-5 and listed all the things I would do each week. 

I also created my own comprehension checks based on questions I wanted my students answering about the text they read. There are comprehension questions for the Reading Writing Workshop story as well as the Literature Anthology story. Practicing writing constructed response answers truly help my students with their writing and to prepare them for question 21 on the weekly assessment. 

For planning purposes, it was really easy to stick to my schedule and pull out the resources I created.  I would stick my weekly plans in a sheet protector and use the same plans week to week. In my planner, I'd just write down specific page numbers or activities that I would be doing for that week. In the afternoons from 12:00-1:00 I teach writing and grammar. I use interactive notebook pages  when introducing new grammar skills. 

I hope this post was helpful to you. If you're new to the Wonders program, give it some time. It can definitely be very overwhelming at first, but it'll get better once you've established routines, procedures and become a little more familiar with it. 

Five for Friday

Aloha, fellow teacher friends!

It sure has been awhile..but I'm here to share with you what I've been up to this past week.

Today I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for:

This week we went on field trip to the Living Art Marine Center. The kids got to touch the invertebrate sea creatures, and even do their very own Gyotaku printings! 

We've been hard at work learning about the Elements of Art. This week we learned about lines and shapes. We created the beautiful piece of artwork pictured above using various types of lines and went around the school hunting for geometric and organic shapes. 

All of the activities we did this week can be found in this resource! 

We've been working on determining the author or main character's point of view and providing text evidence to support our answers. 

These task cards from Adventures of Mrs. Smith have been such a huge help for us to practice this skill! {Click on the photo below if you'd like to check it out on TPT} 

We've also begun to work on data analysis this week ...

This past week, we have been having some CRAZY traffic on Oahu due to the zip mobile being broken. Being that we live on an island, there aren't any replacement parts nor did anywhere on the island carry these said parts. SO 2 lanes on the free way going West bound (which is where all the heavy afternoon traffic is) were closed causing a normal 1 hour commute in traffic to be anywhere from 3-6 hours!!! 

The hubby and I unfortunately live on the West side..so we took advantage and headed into town (opposite direction) and went in search of a happy hour. Lucky thing, we rolled up to a restaurant where my brother was starting a beer tasting (for a new restaurant he is opening) so we got in on it!! 

We got to sample all of these delicious craft beers. My favorite was the Belching Beaver Milk Stout (tastes exactly like coffee!) 

Happy Easter! I hope you enjoy this weekend with loved ones!!