This practice guide provides four recommendations for teaching foundational reading skills to students in kindergarten through 3rd grade. Each recommendation includes implementation steps and solutions for common obstacles. The recommendation also summarize and rate supporting evidence. This guide is geared towards teachers, administrators, and other educators who want to improve their students’ foundational reading skills, and is a companion to the practice guide, Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade.
Students who read with understanding at an early age gain access to a broader range of texts, knowledge, and educational opportunities, making early reading comprehension instruction particularly critical. This guide recommends five specific steps that teachers, reading coaches, and principals can take to successfully improve reading comprehension for young readers.
This booklet summarizes what National Reading Panel researchers have discovered about how to teach children to read successfully. The guide lists the main research findings related to phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension and suggests best instructional practices in each area.
This publication helps educators create differentiated reading instruction experiences for their students by showing the relationship between two distinct resources: Student Center Activities (SCA) and the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Reading specialists, reading coaches, and teachers will find this document useful in lesson planning, as it contains crosswalks that map the relationships between each SCA and a corresponding, grade-specific standard in CCSS. The guide illustrates how SCAs relate to standards in English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects in K–5.
Created for preschool through second grade teachers, our Teachers’ Guide lists typical reading achievements by grade level and suggests how teachers can foster the development of phonemic awareness, fluency, spelling, writing, and comprehension skills.
As students progress through schooling, they are often faced with the challenges of comprehending informational and content area text. Informational texts are known for their use of text features. This guide takes you on a teacher’s journey to understanding the importance of teaching text features and shows you how to apply some of these activities in the classroom and with your students.
Research has shown that students can be taught to comprehend the material better while they are reading. Successful instruction of this type has usually focused on the teaching of comprehension strategies — that is, intentional actions students can use during reading to guide their thinking. Such strategies improve both understanding and memory. Some strategies that have been successfully taught include summarization, questioning, story maps, comprehension monitoring, and graphic organizers; however, the teaching of the combined use of multiple strategies has been most effective in improving reading. Strategy teaching is most effective when it takes a gradual release-of-responsibility approach in which the teacher models the strategy use (“I do it”), guides students to use it successfully within reading (“We do it”), and then assigns independent practice with the strategy (“You do it”). Reading comprehension instruction needs to take place in both narrative and expository text.
