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 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 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 Students using Read Naturally Live have completed more than 1,000,000 stories! Since being released in June of 2011, thousands of teachers have used Read Live with tens of thousands of students. We have received fantastic feedback from teachers and students, and it’s clear Read Naturally Live is the best version of the Read Naturally strategy ever. I have a feeling two million stories isn't that far off.
Read more Have you ever looked at your to-do list and wondered when it became so unwieldy? Lists seem to have an affinity for lengthening instead of shortening. It’s true of to-do lists, and it can be true of student lists in Read Live.
New students are added to your Read Live database each year. Additionally, many administrators import their entire student body into the database, even though some students don’t use Read Live. While these features offer convenience, they can also result in excess “clutter” to sort through when working with students or generating student reports. Thankfully, there are quick and easy ways to shorten your student lists to show only the students with whom you are working.
Read more Wouldn't that be wonderful! In reality, many students are impatient for your help. Fortunately, Read Naturally has a few tricks up its sleeve to keep your students engaged as they wait.
When students reach their goal on a Read Naturally story, they should read the story again, answer the comprehension questions, and continue practicing until you’re able to pass them. After completing these tasks, students should work on wait-time activities.
Read more As students work through Read Naturally stories, their progress monitoring graphs motivate them to put forth their best effort. From the beginning of the story to the end, motivation plays a key role. But this motivation shouldn't end with the story. How can you keep your students motivated to work through an entire level of stories, and the next level after that?
Read more Last week, we discussed the importance of using the Read Naturally placement passages to place your students in Read Naturally. Yet even if you follow that procedure to a tee, some students will perform unexpectedly. Therefore, the next step in the placement process is to evaluate each student’s initial placement to ensure it was correct.
Read more Years ago, Read Naturally cofounder Candyce Ihnot asked a little boy named Christopher about his experience shopping for new shoes. “How many pair of shoes do you usually try on?” she asked. Christopher responded by rattling off several numbers, which helped Candyce make her point. In order to find the best fit, kids often need to try on a number of different styles and sizes. Similarly, students new to the Read Naturally program need to “try on” a few levels to find the fit that’s exactly right for them. We call this process placement.
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