Many students struggle to acquire adequate reading comprehension and writing skills. Although word recognition and spelling are needed to fully actualize these skills, the oral language aspects of reading and writing can be taught and practiced without text. Oral storytelling is good for all students, but it may be essential for students with…

Research has indicated that a large percentage of primary-grade students who struggle in reading have not achieved full competency in the foundational reading competencies (word recognition and fluency). In this article, the author argues that more intensive instruction of the foundational competencies is needed and proposes a simple lesson…

Teachers in primary classrooms who are emphasizing high-level comprehension of complex texts are seeing young children hit comprehension thresholds that were previously only visible among older readers. However, most primary level reading interventions focus on word recognition skills or reading increasingly difficult leveled texts. This article…

The purpose of this article is to describe a strategy called the Poetry Academy used to boost reading skills in elementary school students. The Poetry Academy paired struggling readers with a community volunteer to read poetry on a weekly schedule to practice fluency, work on word recognition abilities, and build confidence. A research study took…

Two struggling fourth-grade readers with learning disabilities who have severe deficits in word recognition, comprehension, and reading fluency improve their reading skills using a method that combines intensive word study with the timed repeated reading of poetry. The direct instruction included semantics, morphology, orthography, and…

In urban elementary schools, considerable energy is focused on raising children's achievement in literacy. Literacy is central to learning in all subject areas throughout school, and in every aspect of literacy achievement--whether it's comprehension, vocabulary, word recognition, or writing. Research has shown that children in U.S. urban schools…

Addressing beginning reading instruction in urban schools, this article proposes that a curriculum gap exists in many K-3 classrooms that operate under the guidelines of the No Child Left Behind Act and Reading First. The authors make a case for the inclusion of systematic and sustained instruction in comprehension, content knowledge, and writing…

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…

Drawing on research-informed principles for primary-grade vocabulary instruction, the authors developed a series of engaging vocabulary units for a first-grade class. The units, focused on the explicit teaching of target words and the efficient highlighting of larger sets of semantically related words, involved five complementary elements: reading…

Envisioning oneself as a competent reader is an important first step to reading well. This article describes an intervention that employs drawings coupled with teacher-student dialogue, which sets the stage for strategy learning as a key to word-solving. A process for the interventionist, Title I or any teacher working with students who find…

Research suggests that parent involvement improves academic achievement, but in the busy world in which we live it is often difficult to promote. Many researchers suggest that successful programs value parents' limited time constraints, diversity of literacy skills, and availability of materials. The Great Poetry Race provides an easy vehicle to…

Describes how the author worked with one struggling reader to help him learn to make balanced and consistent use of different cues for word identification (graphophonic cues, how words look, grammatical appropriateness of words, sentence meaning, or background knowledge). (SR)

Homework is an instructional staple for most classroom teachers; however, considerable debate over the effectiveness of homework has been at the center of discussions among researchers, administrators, educators, parents, and students. Rather than continuing the battle as to whether or not homework enriches learning, it appears the more…