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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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.
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.
Seeing Themselves as Capable and Engaged Readers: Adolescents and Re/mediated Instruction
Re/mediation involves refashioning classroom instruction to incorporate multiple forms of media. In this Learning Point Associates article, a reading researcher looks at several real-world examples showing how re/mediation can helps adolescents feel greater engagement in reading and learning.
Poor Children's Fourth-Grade Slump
Teachers have often reported a fourth-grade slump in literacy development, particularly for low-income children, at the critical transition from "learning to read" to "reading to learn." This study uses Chall's stages of reading development to take a closer look.
Blending Multiple Genres in Theme Baskets
The theme-basket concept of literature instruction combines several approaches known to work with marginalized readers, students with learning disabilities, and ELLs: 1) a thematic approach to teaching literature, 2) the use of children’s books in secondary classrooms, 3) the coupling of young adult books with the classics, and 4) capitalizing on young adults’ background knowledge, interests, and skills in reading multiple genres. This article includes a sample theme basket with The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck as its centerpiece.
The Little Reading Cafe
Looking for new ways to motivate students to read? This teacher borrowed ideas from bookstore cafes to create a comfortable atmosphere for reading in her classroom.
Hooking Struggling Readers: Using Books They Can and Want to Read
One of the keys to helping struggling readers is to provide them with books that they can and want to read. Fiction for struggling readers must have its own textual integrity: realistic characters, readable and convincing text, and a sense of the readers' interests and needs. Texts such as non-fiction books, newspapers, magazines and even comic books can also hook students into reading.
What's the Big Idea? Integrating Young Adult Literature in the Middle School
Drawing on New York City teachers' experiences, this article examines three ways to effectively integrate young adult literature into the curriculum: use core texts (usually novels, but also other genres as well) that the entire class read and study together; organize literature study with text sets, allowing students to select from multiple texts to read; and incorporate independent reading into coursework (via Sustained Silent Reading or "at-home" reading assignments).
