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.
- Strategy 1
- Strategy 2
Instructional Strategy
Read aloud to children in an interactive and conversational style.
Through shared reading (or dialogic reading), children learn about reading concepts by experiencing a learning environment rich in signs, symbols, words, numbers, and art that reflect diverse cultures. When children are read to regularly and encouraged to intentionally interact with printed materials, they develop an interest in books and other printed materials.
Source: Arizona Early Learning Standards
Effective Practices
- Engage children in interactive reading (dialogic reading).
- Use concrete and abstract comments and questions to facilitate discussions.
- Provide multiple opportunities for children to talk.
- Read familiar books to extend conversation and increase child participation.
- Support dialogic reading through the formation of small groups to enhance vocabulary and oral language skills through repeated, interactive book readings.
- Support dialogic reading using the book as a prop to teach new words, ask open-ended questions and expand child responses, and discuss narrative, concepts, and personal connections.
- Teach children comprehension and text structure.
- Encourage children to take an active role in reading activities.
- Teach children to identify characters and major events in a story.
- Provide opportunities for children to ask and answer a variety of questions about books and stories told.
- Provide opportunities for children to draw connections between story events and personal experiences.
- Provide opportunities for children to identify events and details in a story and make predictions.
Tools and Activities
Dialogic Reading Book Template
Dialogic reading is an example of an instructional tool that caregivers can use to be more intentional when reading aloud to young children. This book template can assist you in planning dialogic reading lessons and can be used to remind you what types of questions to ask each day, which words are target words, and where the target words appear in the book. Attached it to the back of your dialogic reading book to guide you throughout the lesson.e the use of new vocabulary throughout the day.
Download from the Florida Department of Education
Vocabulary Having a Conversation While Reading
Before reading:
- Considering the child’s interests, carefully select a book that has rich narrative, interesting content, detailed illustrations, and appropriate vocabulary.
- Read through and identify where you will introduce targeted vocabulary.
- Before reading, show objects and pictures as ways to introduce new words.
- Ask questions.
During reading:
- Read expressively.
- Focus on introduced vocabulary words.
- Ask open-ended questions to promote discussion.
- Evaluate and expand on the child’s response.
- Repeat the initial question to check that the child understands the new information.
After reading:
- Encourage the child to retell the elements of the story (looking for sequence of events and important details).
- Encourage the child to make connections between the events in the story and experiences they have had.
Appropriate prompts to encourage interaction:
- Completion questions encourage a child to finish a phrase.
- Recall questions help check the child’s understanding.
- Open-ended questions increase the amount of dialogue about a book.
- "Wh" questions (who, what, where, when, and why) can help teach new vocabulary.
- Distancing prompts (sometimes referred to as self-to-text questions) encourage the child to connect the story to experiences in his or her own life.
- Allow sufficient time for child to respond.
Instructional Strategy
Provide young children with many opportunities to engage with print materials and books in multiple environments.
Print and language rich environments are critical to the development of language and literacy skills. Creating print and language rich environments help support early literacy skills such as print concepts and bridge the connection between letters and initial efforts to read.
Young children need to have access to a variety of fiction and nonfiction books throughout the day, including those that reflect diverse cultures. Through these experiences, children learn to hold books right side up and to turn the pages one at a time to view the illustrations and to gain a sense of the story or content.
Source: Arizona Early Learning Standards, Wisconsin State Standards
Effective Practices
- Provide opportunities for children to explore print in their everyday lives.
- Support recognizing print by labeling objects.
- Encourage children to notice street signs.
- Create a book of environmental print that includes familiar logos.
- Provide opportunities for children to interact with and care for books in all environments.
- Teach children book handling skills.
- Teach children to hold a book right side up with the front cover facing them.
- Teach children that print in a book runs left to right and top to bottom directionally.
- Teach children where in a book to begin reading.
- Teach children that a book has a title, author, and/or illustrator.
Tools and Activities
Print Awareness: An Introduction
Learn more about how children begin to understand that written language is related to oral language and the strong relationship between print awareness and future reading acheivement.
Learn More from Reading Rockets
Activities: Environmental Print
There are many simple ways to use environmental print as opportunities for children to interact with letters, sounds, and words.
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.