In many schools, today teachers are searching for an effective way to instruct students about reading and vocabulary. Many of them have went to workshops, read books, observed other effective and still there is no clear cut answer to this problem that is being experienced nation-wide.
As a result, we are here today to try think of ways to make this process easier. The most obivous fact that I must note though is that every student is different and therefore, reading instructional strategies from student to student changes each time.
Below, I am going to list a few helpful strategies to not only increase reading instruction, but also student's motivation about reading.
1. Make reading relevant: Students often find themselves in situations where they are reading text that does not have any connection to them at all. Thus, they are turned away from even reading. As a teacher, you must try to connect readings to student's lives as much as possible.
2. Challenge students to a certain extent: Some students excel at reading and other students struggle a lot. As a teacher, you need to find a way to meet the needs of both types of students. This means you must increase your classroom library to include books that can accomodate all levels of readers.
3. Make Reading Fun: At first glance, you may think this may be similar to number one, but it is not.Students need reading to be fun. Think about all the other things that students can do as an alternative to reading. Therefore, you much find ways to make reading action-filled for students.
4. Sufficient Reading: While, we do want to increase student's ability to read, we must keep in mind how much reading we put on students each night. Too much reading can lead to lower student's motivation to read. we do not want this to happen to our students, so we need to ensure that we are gaging the amount of reading given to students daily.
5. Develop Decoding from the beginning: Decoding is the ability to identify a word from a group of letter. It requires phonemic awareness and phonics. Many students ability to read is affected by not being able to decode words. This decreases motivation drastically and is not good for young readers.
I believe by following these helpful tips. Students motivation to read will increase. As a result, you reading instruction will be more effective. So, think about it, reading is a key life skill.
Ashley, I'm glad you made a point about developing a library. As teachers, it is crucial, as Atwell mentions, to create a library with a wide range of texts: young adult literature, novels, classics, poetry anthologies, and nonfiction works.
ReplyDeleteAnother important point you make is to assign students an adequate amount of reading. Assigning too much reading will intimidate students, just as assigning too many vocabulary words encourages rote memorization and little actual learning.
I, like Amy, agree with your note about the classroom library. It is important to provide students with a wide variety of literature to choose from. The context of this point - you began the point by mentioning a need to challenge students - made me think of a question that probably has more "correct" answers than we could imagine in years: how do you ensure that students with access to this library choose the books that are appropriately challenging for their reading levels? I had an obsession with Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo as a middle school student, but some friends with the same reading abilities chose much simpler books. Any suggestions (from anyone) for pushing students towards their individual "right" levels?
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