Best Reading Practices

The primary goal of the language and literacy program is to expand a child's ability to communicate through speaking, reading, and writing. Technical skills or subskills are taught as needed to accomplish the larger goals - not as the goal itself. Teachers provide generous amounts of time and a variety of interesting activities through which children develop language, writing, spelling, and reading ability.

Appropriate Reading Practices

• Look through books or read high-quality children's literature and nonfiction for both pleasure and information.
• Allow students to draw, dictate, and write about their activities or fantasies.
• Plan and implement projects that involve research at suitable levels of difficulty.
• Create teacher-made or student-written lists of steps to follow to accomplish a project.
• Discuss what was read.
• Prepare a weekly class newspaper.
• Interview various people to obtain information for projects.
• Make books of various kinds (e.g., riddle books, what-if books, books about pets).
• Listen to recordings or view high-quality films of children’s books.
• Read at least one high-quality book or part of a book to the student each day.
• Visit the school library and the library area of the classroom regularly.

Each day, some children may read aloud to the teacher, another child, or a small group of children, while other children may do so weekly. Subskills such as learning letters, phonics, and word recognition are taught as needed to individual children and small groups through enjoyable games and activities.
Teachers use the teacher's edition of the basal reader series as a guide to plan projects and hands-on activities relevant to what is read and to structure learning situations. Teachers accept children's invented spelling with minimal reliance on teacherprescribed spelling lists. Teachers also teach literacy as the need arises when working on science, social studies, and other content areas.

Inappropriate Reading Practices

• Making the goal of the reading program solely that each child pass the standardized tests given throughout the year at or near grade level.
• Teaching reading only as the acquisition of skills and subskills.
• Teaching reading only as a discrete subject.
• Seeing instruction of other subjects as being separate from reading.
• Considering silence in the classroom to be a sign of excellent teaching.
• Allowing conversation to only occur during infrequent, selected times.
• Focusing on language, writing, and spelling instructions in workbooks.
• Teaching writing as grammar and penmanship.
• Focusing the reading program on the basal reader, to be used only in reading groups and accompanying workbooks and worksheets.
• Preparing the reading lesson in the teacher's guidebook for each group each day and seeing that the other children have enough seat work to keep them busy through the group reading time.
• Limiting phonics instruction to learning rules rather than understanding systematic relationships between letters and sounds.
• Requiring children to complete worksheets tied to the basal reader even though they are capable of reading at a higher level.
• Knowing which children are in the slower reading group.
• Rejecting children's writing efforts if they use incorrect spelling or poor English.