Strategies, Practices and Tools
Decades of research provides a clear understanding of how skilled reading develops and how to most effectively support children in learning to read proficiently. Evidence-based, structured literacy instruction develops all the foundational language and literacy skills that must be woven together so that children can make meaning from the words they read.
The information presented here is intended to complement evidence-based core reading curricula and intervention programs already in place and help educators fill in gaps or modify their approaches with effective strategies, instructional practices, and tools and activities to implement them.
Early childhood educators can focus their practices to help children build language and emergent literacy skills. Pre-K and K-3 educators can find evidence-based ways to provide explicit, implicit, and incidental instruction across the essential components of literacy. And English Language Arts teachers across grades 4-12 will find effective practices to help students meet the increasing need for skilled reading.
Instructional Strategy
Provide students with intentional opportunities, as well as implicit opportunities to learn about the world around them.
Building background knowledge is essential and begins at birth. Building background knowledge should occur simultaneously with instruction that focuses on the foundational skills needed to “learn to read and write” while also supporting students in their transition to “using reading and writing as tools for learning.”
Systematically building knowledge is also vital, so students can understand and apply what they learn from the words on the page and can write in a way that shares their knowledge with others. In combination, these components build on and strengthen one another.
Students learn more effectively when they have familiarity with the content they are about to learn. When teachers link what students already know (prior knowledge) with the new concepts to be introduced, they stimulate student interest, motivation, and curiosity, and give learners a sense of purpose for learning.
Source: Colorin Colorado
Effective Practices
- Activate students’ prior knowledge.
- Use a variety of advanced organizers to assess a child’s prior knowledge.
- After assessing prior knowledge, use a variety of instructional strategies to introduce the material and address the diversity of learning styles and experiences students may have.
- Create language-rich environments that build knowledge and motivate young children to want to learn to read.
- Expand access to texts that build knowledge through read alouds and text-based discussion.
- Apply strategies for sense-making such as attending to the structure of a text, previewing, summarizing, and others.
- Build knowledge and provide opportunities for students to apply what they learn in a real world context.
- Use of a curriculum that is knowledge-rich, coherently sequenced, and well-implemented.
- Utilize a spiraling curriculum where topics are revisited across grade levels to add to students’ schema about identified topics.
- Build prior knowledge through interactive and engaging learning:
- Dialogic Reading
- Conceptually connected text
- Pair books with hands-on activities
- Kindergarten
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- Teach related words, phrases, and ideas, including academic vocabulary.
- Extend learning through individual and small group activities that prompt students to draw on their knowledge and use complex, content-rich language, such as discussions or sensory learning.
- Use knowledge-building curriculum.
- Grade 1
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- Develop thematic units based on current science and social studies content that are meant to introduce students to a handful of schemas to help them read and understand texts on various topics that branch out from them.
- Teach students to connect new knowledge to existing schema.
- Measure students’ ability to read informational text.
- Teach students the following:
- Compare and contrast
- Use analogies
- Topic-focused reading
- Teach words in categories.
- Grade 2
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- Provide opportunities for students to read and listen to texts about a social studies topic and engage in experiences such as map-making and interviewing.
- Support students to apply and share their knowledge by producing written works for their community, such as fliers, postcards, or letters to local leaders, all with positive effects.
- Grade 3
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- Directly teach key background knowledge before, during, and after reading.
- Utilize multiple texts for instruction.
- Help students connect and integrate their knowledge before, during, and after reading by using instructional tools such as questions and prompts, K-W-L charts, and revisit initial anticipation guides.
- Conduct post-reading checks to assess students’ ability to use gained knowledge.
Tools and Activities
Building Background Knowledge
Practical classroom strategies to build background knowledge such as using contrasts and comparisons and encouraging topic-focused wide reading.
Learn More from Reading Rockets
10 Ways to Bring Knowledge-Building Into Classrooms
A series of articles from ASCD with evidence-based instructional practices for educators to support literacy through knowledge building:
Learn More: The Language Basis of Knowledge
Learn More: Helping Students Access Complex, Knowledge-Rich Texts
Learn More: Setting the Conditions for Building Knowledge
Other Tools/Activities
- Dialogic read alouds
- Use of connected text sets
- Pair books with real-life or direct experiences (field trips or virtual field trips)
- Use concrete objects
- Make connections to other disciplines (social studies, science, health, math, etc.)
Using Graphic Organizers with ELLs
Graphic organizers are useful tools when teaching English language learners (ELLs), especially in small group activities. Visual illustrations allow ELLs to better understand the material while learning important vocabulary.
Learn More from Colorin Colorado
Concept Maps (Graphic Organizer)
A concept map is a visual organizer that can enrich students’ understanding of a new concept. Using a graphic organizer, students think about the concept in several ways. Most concept map organizers engage students in answering questions such as, “What is it? What is it like? What are some examples?”
Learn More from Reading Rockets
Frayer Model (Graphic Organizer)
The Frayer model is a vocabulary tool that helps build students' vocabulary. It requires students to define a vocabulary word or concept, generate examples and non-examples, provide characteristics, and illustrate the meaning of the word.
Download from AdLit
Story Map (Graphic Organizer)
Story maps are a type of graphic organizer that students can use to show the elements of a narrative text and after reading a text students can use this graphic organizer to assess their understanding of narrative text elements.
Download from Iowa Reading Research Center
K-W-L
KWL stands for determining What I Know, What I Want to Learn, and reviewing What I Have Learned. This procedure helps students learn to activate their background knowledge and set purposes for reading.
Learn More from Reading Rockets
Related
Developmental benchmarks and literacy behaviors that most children display at a particular age/grade.
Evidence-based reading interventions support students who are identified as struggling with specific foundational literacy skills.
Evidence-based core curricula, interventions, and supplemental programs play a critical role in supporting students’ reading success.
While seemingly effortless, good reading is made up of a set of complex skills and strategies.