Meangingful Prompts for Struggling Readers

When I was in fourth grade, my class had to memorize our math facts to automaticity and quote each family of facts to the teacher within a given time frame (60 seconds per fact family, if I remember correctly). Everyone who quoted all their fact families through 12s by Thanksgiving was rewarded with a Winnie the Pooh party after lunch one day. All the A.A. Milne characters were going to be at the party and the class was going to eat popcorn and a Winnie the Pooh-decorated cake and watch a Pooh movie. This was a really big deal when I was in 4th grade! Now, math has never been my strong suit – I’m a linguistic learner. Sadly, I was the only student in all of fourth grade who couldn’t quote all the fact families in the 60-second-per-family-time-frame . . . and so I sat in the hall with a student teacher, practicing my facts, while my peers enjoyed their hot popcorn and cool Pooh party. At the time, I was devastated. Not because I missed out on the movie and cake, but because I truly couldn’t remember that tricky 8x7 and I felt like a failure. My teacher was disappointed in me and my parents were none too happy, either, judging this failure to memorize my math facts as laziness or a lack of character. How glad I am that teaching methods have evolved since I was a fourth grader (many, many moons ago!) and today we look for ways to help students truly understand math concepts rather than just memorize them by rote. Unfortunately, that change in thinking about how we teach math doesn’t always transfer to how we teach reading.

In many (dare I say most?) classes, when readers are unsure of a word, they pause. Then one of three things usually happens: Either another student calls out the word and the reader repeats it and goes on, the teacher calls out the word and the reader repeats it, or the teacher says, “Sound it out” . . . but our students are so afraid of failure that most of the time they will remain silent until someone calls the word out (or they don’t understand what “sound it out” means . . . or sounding it out doesn’t make sense because challenging words are often not phonics-based words). This is a huge disservice to readers because they don’t learn the skills necessary to figure out words they don’t know. So, I’m here to say: when readers struggle, don’t give them the word – and teach your students not to call the word out, either!

The first few times this happens in my class, students do blurt the word out because this is what they are conditioned to do anytime there’s an awkward pause in reading. I stop everything and we have a teachable moment: thank you for wanting to be a good friend, but giving classmates the word robs them of an opportunity to learn how to figure it out. We all get stuck sometimes in our reading – and we all deserve the chance to learn how to figure out the words we’re stuck on. So, let’s not rob one another of those learning opportunities. After the third or fourth such discussion, it’s rare for students to blurt words out when classmates are stuck. Here’s the kicker . . . I don’t give students the word, either! Instead, I prompt them with thinking-cues, such as:

Struggling readers often freeze and wait for someone to blurt out challenging words, but allowing students to form such habits (either waiting or blurting!) doesn’t give them the necessary tools to repair their own reading and improve their own skills. It’s much more effective to create an atmosphere in which all students know that it’s okay not to know challenging words . . . but it’s not okay not to try to figure them out before getting help!

Students who don’t develop effective reading strategies slide along a downward spiral – they do less and less reading until they stop trying altogether. Students need to hear, “It’s okay to struggle with challenging words. Some words stump me, too! Let’s figure out how to figure tricky words out!”

On a separate (but somewhat related) note, let’s make it okay to struggle . . . even okay to fail in our struggles . . . because we learn perseverance in the struggle. We also learn how to do things differently and better. What? Sounding the word out didn’t work? That’s okay – that means we try a different strategy!

Here are a few great quotes to hang in the classroom to remind us – and our students – that it’s okay to struggle and fail and learn from what didn’t work and keep trying a new strategy until something does work! The key for students is to keep trying . . . and the key for teachers is to keep giving students a toolbox of strategies to keep trying!

Happy Teaching!

Four Simple Ways to Help Struggling Readers and English Language Learners

Looking for some simple yet effective ways to help struggling readers and English Language Learners in your classroom? Aside from working on skill-building and reading strategies, there are a few quick and easy modifications you can make to your resources to help your struggling readers:

1 – Use a sans serif font, such as Arial, Century Gothic, Trebuchet, or Verdana. Serifs – or the small projecting features at the ends of letters in fonts such as Times New Roman – can slow reading down considerably, causing students to lose the meaning of the text.

2 – Be sure you have only one space at the end of sentences, rather than the old-school method of two spaces. Two spaces at the ends of sentences looks like a running pool of blank space to struggling readers. It draws their eyes away from the actual words, making reading a tedious process.

3 – Do not justify reading passages. To the detriment of my inner artsy, creative child: I love order, organization, and symmetry – which means I LOVE to justify my texts so that both the left and the right columns are evenly spaced . . . as you can tell from all my blog posts. To me, this makes the text look polished and professional, as in a novel. However, fully justified text causes struggling readers to see rivers of space, making the words disjointed and causing learners to read in clipped, fragmented phrases, breaking down comprehension. For many struggling readers, it’s better to left-justify text and let the right column look ragged.


4 – When possible, copy worksheets on blue or green paper. White paper creates a glare for struggling readers, making it difficult to concentrate on the words and causing them to fatigue quicker. If it’s not possible to copy on blue paper, consider purchasing blue overlays for students to place over their worksheets.

While the following pages may look similar to non-struggling readers, there is a world of difference in them for struggling readers. I modified page 2 in less than three minutes; for struggling learners, it is much more conducive to fluent reading, leading to increased comprehension: 

Taking a bit of time to implement these quick and simple tips can make a huge difference for some students, creating a more inclusive and thoughtful learning environment that sets more students up for success!

Have a tip to add? Please share it below!

Use Audiobooks to Build Fluency and Comprehension

Have you discovered audiobooks? Are you using them regularly with your child(ren) and your students? Audiobooks, or recorded books, have exploded in popularity since the days of clunky cassettes and scratchy CDs. Today, you can download audiobooks for your classroom computer, iPod, iPad, Kindle, Nook, or Smartphone . . . meaning almost everyone has an audiobook player in her pocket! 

 

With engaging narration, background music, and even sound effects, audiobooks have become a staple of “digital entertainment” . . . which is fabulous news for teachers for two reasons:

1 – Audiobooks can hook reluctant readers, helping them fall in love with an author, a series, or a genre! Students who have the misperception that they hate reading quickly change their attitudes when they discover audiobooks! Teachers can harness the power of audiobooks to help students increase their interest and engagement with captivating stories, then use the printed book and the audiobook simultaneously to get students reading! When students are really engaged in a story and they cannot access the audiobook for any length of time, it’s amazing how quickly they want to grab the printed book to pick up where the audio recording left off!

Use audiobooks to help struggling, reluctant, or second-language readers discover books they love, and then give them a hard copy of the book to read while they listen. Soon, your reluctant readers will become motivated readers!

2 – Audiobooks help students build fluency! Fluency is not about being able to read a lot of words accurately and quickly. It is about using our voice to give meaning and feeling to the words. We do this by pausing appropriately at punctuation and –most importantly – making the words on the page come alive!

Fluency is a difficult skill to teach and nearly impossible to teach without modeling, modeling, modeling . . . of course, the problem is teachers do not have time to model every day for each student at his or her reading level and with books (s)he is specifically interested in . . . that is exactly what audiobooks do! They model fluency in a way that teachers just do not have time to do every single day!

If you are working on fluency with your child or your students, audiobooks can be your best friend! However, they must be used in a unique way to build this skill:

Have the student listen to an audiobook they are really interested in while reading the printed book at the same time.

Periodically, have the student rewind the recording and read a section of the book aloud while listening to it. Prompt the student to make his voice match the voice on the audio recording.

Students must be listening to the audiobook, looking at a hard copy of the book, and reading the book aloud all at the same time. Fluency is modeled and students are practicing with a better understanding of what their voices should sound like when they are reading fluently. Ideally, struggling readers will practice fluency skills this way every day. Start with a minute of reading aloud and gradually increase their time to five minutes a day. Students will listen to audiobooks much longer, of course – these few minutes are strictly their time to focus on and practice fluency skills.

Additional Bonuses:

Audiobooks can help students hear the correct pronunciation of words or phrases that are difficult to decode, often providing students with an “a-ha moment!”

Students are absorbing the printed text with a variety of senses and modalities, dramatically increasing their understanding of the text, as well as their ability to remember details of the text for a longer period of time.

Audiobooks can help readers understand and appreciate texts that are above their independent reading level – this is vitally important if you are working with older readers reading at beginner levels.

As fluency and decoding skills increase, comprehension skills naturally increase!

Audiobooks allow teachers to differentiate instruction for several students a day in a way that secondary teachers usually do not have time for.

The use of audiobooks in primary and intermediate grades may be common; unfortunately, it is nearly non-existent in middle school and high school. If you’re not using audiobooks as one tool to help struggling, reluctant, and second-language readers, give them a try . . . they can be one of your most powerful tools in helping adolescent readers become better readers!

 

Happy Listening!

How Do I Know My Students’ Reading Levels?

Okay . . . so students need to be reading at their Instructional Level in order to learn new skills. How do I know what their Instructional Level is?

 

Trust me . . . this is not a dumb question! Most primary teachers assess their own students reading levels. Intermediate teachers (say 3^rd -5^th grade) most likely assess their own students or have a Reading Specialist or a Literacy Coach who helps assess students. Beyond that – in Middle School and High School – the vast majority of teachers probably have no idea about their students’ reading levels. This makes no sense, as those grades are significantly important for increasing reading strategies. If students leave high school with little or no help, they are not likely to get help. Ever. So, once a child hits middle school, we only have a few years to help them put more strategies in their toolbox . . . yet, those are the very years that most teachers don’t know their students’ reading levels and don’t know how to help students who are reading below grade level. Help!?!

 

 

I’m going to fill my blog with strategies to increase students reading skills and help . . . but first things first: You have a struggling reader or a resistant reader. How do you assess the student’s Independent, Instructional, and Frustration reading levels so you can help him move forward? Here are a few ideas . . .

 

1 – Get ahold of the student’s elementary teachers and ask for the most recent reading assessments, including grade levels. Every student should have records somewhere. Depending on the school district, some students may have been assessed as recently as 5^th or 6^th grade . . . other students may not have had a reading assessment (to determine grade level) since 3^rd grade. But track down the most recent records possible. Scour the records for grade-level, reading-level, and the reading strategies the student was most recently working on.

 

 

2 – If your district has a Reading Specialist or a Literacy Coach, ask this person to assess your struggling student(s) and give you a copy of the results in writing. Even if the person in this position does not work in your building or with your grade level, (s)he may be willing to help. Approach this from a student-centered perspective: “I have some students who seem to be reading below grade level. I want to help them, but I need to know what level they’re reading at so I know the best way to help. I know you are beyond busy, but this is out of my area of expertise. Can I recruit you to help me assess their reading levels so I can help these students make greater progress this year? I’ll do all the work afterwards . . . I just need to know their current reading levels so I have a place to start.”

 

Be the squeaky wheel until you get a reply. Of course, it may help to accompany your request with a couple of nice tea bags, a pack of colorful sticky notes, a mini candy bar, or a can of soda. Something that communicates to this teacher, “I know you’re busy and I’m asking you to go out of your way to help me help my students. I really appreciate your willingness to help. Here’s a small token of my appreciation.”

 

 

3 – Find a reading tutor who may be willing to volunteer to assess your students and give you the results in writing in exchange for a recommendation letter for his or her tutoring business.

 

4 – Contact a local college or university and ask if their education students – those who are in a course on literacy or teaching reading -- can come to your class for half a day to help assess your students’ reading levels. Many college professors would jump at the opportunity to give their students such real-world practice.

 

 

5 – If all else fails, you can try to on-line assessment available through Reading A-Z, found here:

http://www.readinga-z.com/readinga-z-levels/assessing-a-students-level/

 

One thing to keep in mind with on-line assessments or do-it-yourself assessments is that you really need to understand how to complete a Running Reading Record. There is a skill to completing these accurately. The above website has a link to help you review or teach yourself . . . however, if you have not been formally trained in Running Reading Records, your results will not be completely accurate. If you’re in a position in which you really have no other resources, then a close approximation of a student’s reading level is better than no knowledge whatsoever.

 

Don’t be overwhelmed or intimidated! It takes a bit of time and effort to learn your struggling readers’ instructional reading levels . . . but the payoff is HUGE! Once you have answers, you can meet your student where she is at . . . which means you can help her move forward and actually learn new skills and strategies to increase her reading ability! Nothing is more rewarding for a teacher or more life-changing for a student than that!

 

Photo used with parental permission

Here's the Deal about Reading . . .

Literacy teachers classify a student’s reading level into three categories:

Independent Level

Instructional Level

Frustration Level

A child’s independent level includes everything (s)he can read accurately and comprehend easily without help, while frustration level includes the texts (s)he struggles to read accurately and comprehend easily. Literacy teachers would classify frustration level as texts a student reads with less than 95% comprehension. Frustration-level reading should be avoided, as it just leads to students attaching negative emotions to reading. You know your student is reading at her frustration level when you start hearing comments such as: “I hate reading!”

 

If you frequently feel your child or your students are reading books that are too easy, take heart! We should encourage our students to read at their independent level every day, because this is where they build fluency and confidence!

However, to learn new skills and strategies, students must read in that sweet spot – that level that is just above independent, but not quite at frustration. It’s a delicate balance . . . and so often missed in upper grades. Parents want their children reading at grade level, so they give them grade-level books and reading materials. Teachers want them reading at grade level, so they use grade-level materials to try to teach students new skills. But no matter how many books they read and no matter how many times they read the same passage, students who are not reading at grade level are not going to gain new skills by reading numerous grade-level books. If we are going to teach new skills and strategies, we must teach them above a child’s independent reading level and below their frustration level!

So, there’s your insider tip for the day: meet them where they’re at to move them forward! You cannot teach a child to improve his reading skills unless he is working at his instructional reading level. But wait . . . how do you discover a child’s instructional reading level?! If you have tips, please share them in the comments section. Otherwise, stay tuned for the next post . . .


Happy Reading!