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This time of year can find many students lacking in motivation. Thankfully, there are many simple ways to spice up your Read Live or Encore program to keep your students engaged.

One easy way to give students a motivation boost is to have them track the number of stories they complete each week. As they try to match or beat their score from the previous week, students are incentivized to put forth their best effort each day. Read more

When we developed Read Naturally Encore and Read Live, we placed a special emphasis on vocabulary development. Students using these tools now have more vocabulary support than ever, and their reading comprehension is benefiting. Read more

​One of the things teachers love best about the Read Naturally strategy is the concrete data they acquire about their students’ fluency development. The graphs and reports you generate in Encore and Read Live give you a clear picture of each student’s growth. Knowing how to apply this information ensures your students continue to progress at an appropriate pace. Read more

Build mastery and automaticity in phonics and decoding with Word Warm-ups! These quick, easy-to-implement phonics exercises won’t beat the cold winter temperatures, but they will prepare your students for reading success.

Many students have difficulty decoding common phonics and syllable patterns. For these students, you won’t find a better solution than Word Warm-ups. When students receive support in mastering these patterns, reading achievement can grow by leaps and bounds. Read more

Welcome back from winter break! After a week of record-low temperatures here in Minnesota, we’re ready to think about spring. Specifically, we’re thinking about the Setting Spring Targets article we posted on the blog last winter. This article and its companion, Make the Most of Winter Benchmark Assessment Data, contain important information for you to consider as you gear up to conduct winter assessments. These articles instruct you on how to interpret your students’ growth, how to set appropriate goals for fluency improvement, and how to keep your students on track to meet these goals. Click on the links to check out the articles, and let us know how we can assist you in making the second half of this school year as successful as possible. Read more

​When you make a small mistake, do you point it out? Or do you move on and pretend it never happened? Often, we have a tendency to do the latter. So it’s not surprising that your students may be hesitant to call attention to their own errors while reading. In Read Naturally strategy programs, however, we ask them to do just that. Here’s why: Read more

​At the beginning of the school year, I always get a lot of questions about placement. A very common placement question is: Do I conduct placement on students who were working in Read Naturally Live or Read Naturally Encore last year? Read more

You've worked hard all year to accelerate your students’ progress. Thanks to your dedication, many of your students are now reading better than ever. How can you ensure this crucial progress is not lost over the summer?

While you can’t personally be there to ensure your students don’t experience the “summer slide,” you can help them avoid it. It’s as simple as sending home a letter. Read more

What are some similarities and differences between the Taj Mahal and the Golden Temple? What do Read Naturally programs have in common with the Common Core State Standards? How do these questions relate to each other, and most importantly, how do they relate to free resources for teachers?

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) specify that students should have the ability to analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics. Drawing comparisons in this way helps students build knowledge and think critically about the different approaches of various texts. Read more

Which students will you assess for weaknesses in phonics? In some schools and at some grade levels, teachers are required to assess all students using specific assessment tools. In other schools and perhaps in higher grade levels, teachers may want this valuable information, but recognize that individual diagnostic testing of all students is not necessarily an effective use of time. Read more