Sharing Good Practice
7 Literacy strategies to
abandon now
By Betina Fuentes
E
nsuring our students read
every day, can be a stretch, and
making sure that their reading is
meaningful and relevant to the
curriculum can be even more difficult.
Many of us rely on old strategies that
are no longer contributing to student
achievement and understanding. In
the spirit of a new season of planning
before the new school year, let’s
review some of these practices and
investigate replacements that will
engage, entertain and enliven your
students next year.
Assigning the same book to every
student. If we fail to differentiate
reading material, we are guaranteeing
boredom and frustration among
students. Instead, peruse your
school’s resources for several different
books on the same theme or concept,
on different levels. Then assign
these appropriately, so that once
students have completed the reading
assignment, they can come together
to discuss facts they learned from the
reading.
Popcorn reading. This is when
students take turns reading aloud,
passing or “popcorning” the reading
to each other. This strategy, though
popular, has several drawbacks. Not
all students are fluent, and reading
disfluently will hinder some students
learning the proper pronunciation.
Other students are quite sh y about
reading aloud, and will resist, creating
a negative classroom environment.
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Instead of popcorn reading, try
choral reading or echo reading,
where the entire class or group reads
aloud together, or echoes after each
sentence you read. This gives students
who are not fluent or confident the
ability to read aloud without being in
the spotlight.
Silent reading without follow up.
Silent reading is a great opportunity
for students to choose their own books
and focus only on reading. But we lose
a great chance to find out how those
students actually read during the time.
Try a reading log with summary or a
graphic organizer to give students
accountability and responsibility for
their reading.
Assigning books in a vacuum. Always
take into account what the curriculum
is teaching when you assign books
for the class. Students need to feel
that what they are doing is relevant;
otherwise, they fail to have proper
respect for the assignments. If you
can show students that what they are
reading is important and necessary for
the unit, students will be more likely to
read the assignment.
Standardized vocabulary activities.
Looking up definitions in a dictionary,
writing a word twenty times and
writing a sentence for each word,
are all antiquated ideas for teaching
vocabulary. Offer a menu of more
interesting activities such as Frayer
models, using words to draw designs,
Class Time
or even creating a rap or song with
the words. Students will be happy to
choose their own assignments and will
learn more, than with dry vocabulary
work.
Reading only books. Functional
literacy is a term that has been around
for a while. Today, with the age of
technology, it has spurred even more
ideas. Students should be exposed to
articles, tweets, posts, blogs, comics,
puzzles, and all of the writing we
come across in our daily lives. Writing
tweets that other students can then
read, brings a sense of authorship to
students and an interest in what their
peers are writing, naturally fostering a
love of reading.
Monitoring
only
sporadically.
Baseline
and
running
record
assessments are usually given at the
beginning of each new term. Three
months is too long for a problem to
go undiscovered. Make time to hear
each student read to you once a week.
Constant monitoring gives teachers a
chance to jump on a problem before it
grows larger.
Updating your literary bag of tricks
will serve you well in the new school
year. Making substitutions for those
practices you know aren’t getting
results, will change the way your
students approach reading. Have an
excellent summer and happy reading!