There are so many strategies that we learn to teach reading comprehension but in this post, I share my favorite visualizing reading strategy that helps struggling readers improve their reading comprehension: visualization with structure words. This visualizing reading strategy is the foundation of the extremely successful reading program Lindamood-Bell Visualizing & Verbalizing. It is the…
The debate over whether to use decodable books or leveled books has really been firing up lately. Opinions are polarized with many teachers totally ditching leveled readers and others staying away from “boring” decodable texts. So what should you use? Which one is better to use? Well, the truth is that they are both good…
Ask any teacher what their students struggle with the most in reading, and all will say fluency, decoding, or comprehension. And those are the 3 key areas of reading instruction so they are important areas to work on every day. In this post, I’m explaining what reading fluency is and sharing the different ways you…
Since I have written about the science of reading, heart words, and explicit phonics instruction, so many of you have reached out and asked, “so how do I set up my literacy block and work with students in small groups?” I know it can be overwhelming learning that what you’ve been doing needs to change,…
The science of reading is a body of research from the last 40 years that has led to evidence-based reading instruction and recommendations for teaching reading. This research has shown that reading is not natural and needs to be explicitly taught in a systematic way for many students to become fluent readers. Read on to…