Reading is a participation sport!  It can’t be emphasized enough that if we want children to become strong and capable readers, they have to actually READ – plain and simple.  Think about it.  If you wanted to get better at your favorite sport,  how would you do it?  First you would ensure that you had [...]

Research shows that writing reinforces and builds reading skills so the more we get students writing, the more improvements they make in their reading. A great way to get students excited about writing is to get their works published on the internet. Reading Rockets and AdLit.org has recently established a monthly challenge that gives students [...]

Reading response journals can be a great way of helping students of all reading abilities think about the things that happen in a story they are reading.  I like to use a spiral binder for this purpose. When students start a new text, they write the details such as title, author, publication date and so [...]

I wanted to share with you some information that you might find helpful for getting some free books for your classroom or school library. Here is the information from their site: The Literacy Empowerment Foundation (LEF) is inviting school or other literacy projects to apply for free books for Read Across America Day. During the [...]

Get students interested in monitoring their own reactions to text by asking them to rate each chapter of a book they are reading on an “interest level” chart.  After reading each chapter, students color in the bar to indicate how interested they were in the text of that chapter. Students can then discuss their reactions [...]