Motivation
Keeping kids interested and motivated to read can be a challenge. Some students who can read would rather do other things instead, while those who struggle with reading often don't enjoy it. Find out what you can do to motivate kids to read every day.
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How Can Instruction Help Adolescent Students with Motivation?
Despite many teachers' beliefs that they have little influence on student motivation, teachers can influence and support student motivation. This articles highlights four strategies to improve student motivation for reading.
Student Motivation and Engagement in Literacy Learning
To foster improvement in adolescent literacy, teachers should use strategies to enhance students' motivation to read and engagement in the learning process.
Stuck in the Middle: Strategies to Engage Middle-Level Learners
Learn about three strategies that can help create a meaningful curriculum to engage middle-level learners. The strategies draw from effective classroom practices across grade levels as well as from research about the social, emotional, and physical development of middle-level learners.
Movie Read-Alikes from YALSA
If the teens in your life love movies, check out this list of read-alikes for 2008 blockbusters like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Literacy as a Leisure Activity: Free-Time Preferences of Older Children and Young Adolescents
Despite the importance of reading for lexical development, little is known about the pleasure reading habits of today's youth. This investigation examines the preferences of older children and young adolescents with respect to reading as a leisure-time activity and its relationship to other free-time options likely to compete for their attention, the amount of time that young people spend reading for pleasure each day, and the types of materials they most enjoy reading. The study also attempts to determine if preferences for free-time activities and reading materials would evince age- and gender-related differences. The findings could serve as a reference point for understanding what is reasonable to expect of students at this age.
What Are the Key Elements of Student Engagement?
The words "student engagement" might conjure up images of teachers using hip hop to deliver lessons on Shakespeare. The reality is less colorful and more difficult. As part of their series to help schools understand the federal No Child Left Behind Law, Learning Point Associates describes the four key elements of student engagement.
Using Student Engagement to Improve Adolescent Literacy
For struggling adolescent readers, creating student interest is as vital as teaching language skills.
For Teens, Phonics Isn't Enough
Schools often struggle to find appropriate materials and approaches to support adolescent literacy. Strategies that work for children can ignore teens' existing skills, knowledge, and life experience, and exclude them from the critical content that their peers are studying. Here are some effective teaching strategies for struggling older students.
