According to Ruetzel & Cooter, "… writing and reading are mirror processes with reciprocal benefits" (2019, p. 316). When teachers provide opportunities for reading and writing practice every day, children flourish. What better place to infuse this practice than through children's play. As children play, they think critically, answer…

Text-related oral participation is ubiquitous in literacy and language instruction. As such, considering how invitations to these interactions are framed is critical, as this framing is directly implicated in the design of equitable classrooms. In this Teaching Tip, one common technique teachers have been encouraged to use--a class set of…

Running records can be the assessments that teachers are looking for when searching for an efficient way to plan meaningful literacy instruction. Running records can give teachers immediate insights to guide on-the-fly prompting and teaching decisions to build reader independence. The authors use classroom examples to illustrate how taking and…

A hallmark of skilled reading is recognizing written words automatically from memory by sight. How beginning readers attain this skill is explained. They must acquire foundational knowledge, including phonemic segmentation, grapheme-phoneme knowledge, decoding, and spelling skills. When these skills are applied, spellings of words become bonded to…

Choral reading is reading in unison, like a chorus, with the teacher taking the lead (Rasinski, 1989). It is highly efficient because all students practice at the same time (Paige & Magpuri-Lavell, 2014). It is also effective with struggling readers and English Learners because of the "tent of anonymity" it provides when readers read…

This article provides classroom examples of how interactive read-alouds of informational texts facilitate collaborative and respectful discussions that promote literacy learning. Several specific considerations for making interactive read-alouds engaging and successful are presented in an effort to support educators in capitalizing on this…

Reading connected text--that is, multiple sentences related to each other-- requires greater skill than reading isolated words. To read and understand connected text, students must quickly recognize words, integrate what they are reading with their background knowledge, and monitor their comprehension. This document provides a summary of…

This teaching tip showcases how students use iPads to video record themselves orally reading. In the Record, Listen, Reflect process, students conduct repeated readings with a familiar text, watch the recorded video, and conduct running records on themselves. Having an opportunity to watch videos of their own reading gives students a glimpse of…

Ethan Lynn, the author of the article, describes three sets of oral reading activities he developed for his English as a Second Language students. Each set focuses on one of the three types of fluency: word-, sentence-, and passage-level. The word-level fluency activities are best employed as part of the pre-reading phase of a reading activity.…

This article describes the Mother Phonics program as implemented at the Augusta University Literacy Center. A description of the program as well as the Center's facility is offered. The daily schedule and instructional techniques are highlighted. The instructional design embraces the unique learning styles and preferences of struggling readers.…

Learning to read begins at home through everyday parent-child interactions, long before children attend school. Parents' continuing support of literacy development throughout elementary school positively affects their children's reading ability. Many recent efforts to motivate parents to be involved in their child's literacy development involve…

Strong oral reading fluency skills are an important indication of good reading. In addition, reading engagement is often correlated with reading success. Unfortunately, students with learning disabilities (LD) often struggle to read fluently and engage with text. Incorporating graphic novels as part of a comprehensive reading program may help…

This article discusses how to implement paired reading with developing readers to foster students' fluency and reading comprehension. The teacher first helps students comprehend the story with focused discussion questions and the completion of a beginning, middle, and end (B-M-E) chart. Then, the teacher scaffolds students to do the oral reading…

Computer applications related to reading instruction have become commonplace in schools and link with established components of the reading process, emergent skills, decoding, comprehension, vocabulary, and fluency. This article focuses on computer technology in conjunction with durable methods for building oral reading fluency when readers…

Teaching reading to children whose language differs from the oral language of the classroom and from the linguistic structure of academic text adds an additional layer of complexity to reading instruction. There is a large and growing body of evidence indicating that language variation impacts reading, spelling, and writing in predictable ways. In…