A reading specialist who worked in a high-poverty urban elementary school that initially did not have an exemplary reading program provides seven lessons that can serve as a guidepost for other reading specialists. Several approaches that led to improved reading achievement of upper elementary school children are described. The seven lessons, when…

Suggests activities that can assist in learning how to develop hypotheses. (HOD)

Describes reading center activities that take advantage of the citizen's band radio craze to capture student's attention and interest. (HOD)

Describes how to use wordless picture books to develop reading readiness and language competence. (MKM)

Presents six successful approaches for increasing parental awareness of a school's reading program. (MKM)

Describes four teaching techniques which help poor readers experience decoding automatically. (MKM)

Lists 38 ways to more effective teaching of word attack skills. (MKM)

Suggests lessons based on categorizing and several learning modalities to expand students' vocabulary. (MKM)

Trade books and teacher resources for the library are recommended for ten different curricular areas. (MKM)

Interpretive questioning techniques can be used with folktales to enhance children's insight into human problems. (MKM)

Suggests a variety of class activities using word banks. (MKM)

Suggests teaching a compare/contrast method of word identification rather than teaching syllabication rules to decode words and describes research investigating this technique. (MKM)

Explains six tasks which require comprehension of words and which can be used to teach beginning readers. (MKM)

Discusses reading specialists' responsibilities concerning children's vision problems. (MKM)