Reading Instruction Quick Guide: A Foundational Overview of how to Teach Reading
Why is it that reading seems to be the hardest thing to make sense of and teach. I have spent years trying to understand all of the steps that go into teaching students how to read and still get stumped along the way. That’s why I have created a Reading Instruction Quick Guide. It goes over 4 foundational layers of reading from kindergarten to eighth grade with scaffolded information and guideline of how to teach your students to read and comprehend.
This idea originally started because as a teacher in California we have to take the RICA, also known as the Reading Instruction Competence Assessment which has been around since 1998 (National Council of Teacher Quality). It is one piece of the evaluative tools for incoming teachers working towards their credential and was supposed to ensure all incoming teachers knew how to teach reading. Fast forward to now, reading scores are still bad in California and with a teacher shortage and a racially biased test, it is being put out to pasture.
While the test itself has flaws (you can read more about the findings of the RICA results per the CTC), it did help me personally have a much better foundational and explicit understanding of the components of reading, which I wasn’t taught when getting my credential. I used the information from Dr. Chris Nicholas Boosalis Reading Instruction Guides that I used to study for the test and was able to create a four page Reading Instruction Quick Guide for all teachers to use as a starting point for data collection and lesson planning.
I like to think of the Reading Instruction Quick Guide as a crash course to how to teach Reading. Just like how sight words and letter sounds is the beginning for our students reading journey, the Quick Guide is the first thing I created to teach myself how to teach students to read. There are four layers including: foundations of reading, decoding and fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. I tend to be a more visual person and needed an organization of the scaffolds that go into reading to help me better understand how to teach my students to read. A student can’t comprehend if they can’t understand the vocabulary or they may struggle with fluency if they don’t have their foundations like letter names and sounds. See the overview below:
The picture above is a summarized visual of the information found in the reading wheel and guide. This resource is great for creating data books to use with students, finding and creating explicit lessons on the step that your class or small group is working on and so much more. The possibilities are endless and the guide truly helps all teachers understand the foundational steps in teaching reading. Head to the Reading Instruction Quick Guide to find out more information and download it to start planning your language arts lesson plans to ensure you are building on your students prior reading knowledge.
