RN Bookmark

Have you heard of the fourth-grade slump in reading? Research shows that many students experience a decline in their reading ability around grade four, and this decline is linked to the size of their vocabulary. Read more

Investing the time to train your students well in the Read Naturally Live program will yield incredible benefits later. When the steps of the program are easy and automatic for students, they can devote all their mental energy to the important task of reading. That’s why we created A Student’s Guide to Read Naturally Live—a free training resource we hope all Read Naturally Live teachers and aides will take advantage of. This resource makes Read Naturally Live training easier, more efficient, and more enjoyable than ever before. Read more

Back to School! That phrase seems to imply we’re all settling back into something, doesn’t it? But as all educators know, there’s nothing settled about this time of year. It’s a frenzied, fast-paced new start. We’re all ready to go and to grow—forward and onward, not backward. Read more

I’ve long believed that when students work in Read Naturally Live or Read Naturally Encore, we should address their phonics needs as well as improve their reading fluency. Actually, improving phonics skills is foundational to increasing fluency. Read more

Read Naturally programs are inherently motivating. Students know how well they are performing based on their goals and progress monitoring graphs. The desire to see these goals and graphs improve is enough to motivate most students to put forth their best effort. Still, a little external recognition doesn’t hurt. Read more

Snow is still falling in much of the country, but that doesn’t change the fact that spring conferences are just around the corner. Parents (or guardians) of Read Naturally students will be eager to hear about their child’s progress in reading. This is a great opportunity for you to highlight the student’s successes and address challenges—and to emphasize the ways in which parents can support their child at home. Read Naturally offers a variety of resources developed specifically for parents. Read more

We’re always happy when teachers approach us with questions about the Cold Timing step. Teachers are highly concerned with their students’ cold-timing scores, and for good reason. Read more

The second year of my Read Live lab at the new school continues to go smoothly, and I am grateful to have drawn from last year’s stories to improve my process this year. Of course, just as things were starting to feel easy breezy, we hit an unexpected bump. Read more

In my previous blog post , I explained my process for helping students answer questions #3 and #6, the vocabulary questions, correctly in Read Live. Part of my process involved motivating the students to do their best work, which I explained in detail in my previous post. In this post, I’ll delve into the details of how I set up and presented the lesson demonstrating how to answer questions #3 and #6 successfully. Read more

At this point in the school year, most of your Read Naturally students are comfortable with the Read Naturally Strategy and able to work mostly independently. You worked hard to properly train them and to place them in the program, and your hard work is paying off as they’re becoming better readers. However, your involvement at this stage in the process is just as important as it was in the beginning. Now, you must turn your attention to keeping your students challenged. Read more