Mastering Reading Skills

Students Struggling to Master Reading Skills?  Check These Aspects of Instruction

If your students don’t seem to be mastering reading skills or moving towards automaticity, there are several things you may want to evaluate and change to help make instruction more effective.

• Pace– Are you introducing too many skills, moving too quickly or rushing through lessons?
• Thoroughness– Do you take the time to explicitly teach each new letter-sound correspondence and clearly explain new rules and patterns?
• Multisensory Strategies– Are you consistently requiring students to use multisensory strategies that facilitate learning and retaining skills, such as fingertapping, armtapping and verbalizing in the sand tray?
• Opportunities for Practice– Are you providing enough opportunities for the students to practice and apply newly introduced skills in both reading and spelling? Remember, struggling readers especially need continual repetition and ample opportunities to practice with skills in order to master them.

Mastery of foundational reading skills is essential because only with mastery will these skills become automatic.  Automaticity will then allow students to develop reading fluency, which frees up the brain for comprehension.

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