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​The long Minnesota winter is finally over! The snow is gone, the air is warmer, the sun is shining (sometimes), and now that daylight savings is here, the days suddenly feel longer. As much as I love spring (and truly I do!), it causes me some dismay, because I know how its arrival can negatively impact the work ethic of some students. Read more

Picture a struggling reader in your mind. What age is the student? When many people think about struggling readers, they don’t picture teenagers or adults. And yet many middle-school, high-school, and adult learners struggle with reading. To help them achieve literacy, an effective intervention is crucial. Unfortunately, many reading interventions are geared toward younger students. The educators on the Read Naturally team have been aware of this problem since well before the company began in 1991. From the beginning, we have insisted that our programs feature high-interest, nonfiction content. The primary reason for this is so that a Read Naturally intervention can work for a learner of any age. Read more

In her recent blog post All Improvement Is Not Equal!, Read Naturally founder Candyce Ihnot explores the relationship between the number of Read Naturally Live stories her students had read between Fall and Winter and their fluency improvement during that time period. Candyce discovered that the students who had read the most stories had made the greatest gains. Dr. Danielle Dupuis of the University of Minnesota's Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement made the same discovery in her recent analysis of extant data from Read Naturally Live students. Read more

​Imagine you purchase a new workout machine for your home. It’s a top-of-the-line machine, with all the bells and whistles, and it works like a dream. You’re so enamored with the machine that you’re actually motivated to work out! At first. A few weeks or months later, the machine loses its luster and working out doesn’t feel quite as exciting anymore. Does this sound familiar? I hate to tell you this, but it’s not the machine’s fault! Read more

It was the first week of February, and I was just completing the winter benchmark assessment of my Read Live students. I celebrated the student’s fluency gains, and I reminded them that their improvement was due to their own efforts. But, even while celebrating, I noticed something alarming that my students couldn’t. The amount of improvement among my students was far from equal. Read more

About 5 million public school students in the United States today are English Language Learners (ELLs). National Public Radio (NPR) recently conducted a robust research project entitled 5 Million Voices, which set out to discover who these students are and how our public schools are serving them. Read more

Today, we’re thrilled to offer a new training option: The Read Naturally Live Online Course. This course provides interactive training for teachers, helping them gain new skills and understanding independently, at their own pace. And, it’s completely free! Read more

“Everything is going so well,” I thought to myself. “This job gets easier every day!” That’s when the trouble began... Read more

Today I have some thoughts and resources to share on the topic of comprehension. In my last post, I mentioned that the checking initial placement process alerted me to a student—let’s call him Connor—whose average comprehension score was 60% correct. Another student—let’s call her Lucy—was averaging 72% correct. These scores don’t fly in my reading lab. What’s the point of reading if not to comprehend? I want to see all of my students averaging 80% correct (4 out of 5 questions) or better on their first attempt at answering the questions. Read more

For the first time in 25 years, Read Naturally founder Candyce Ihnot has moved her reading lab to a new school. In a series of blog posts, Candyce will share “stories from the lab,” in which she describes the successes, challenges, and surprises of operating Read Naturally Live in a new setting. She’ll sprinkle each post with bits of wisdom from decades of creating Read Naturally materials and using them with the beloved students she keeps at the center of her work. In this post, Candyce solves an important mystery that emerged in the lab after checking her students' initial placement. Read more