Alignment with Recommended Practices

1. Engage students in conversations that support the use and comprehension of inferential language.

2. Explicitly engage students in developing narrative language skills.

3. Teach academic vocabulary in the context of other reading activities.

The engaging non-fiction passages provide many opportunities to learn contextualized content vocabulary. Reinforcement occurs through the following experiences:

• During the Key Words step, students encounter student-friendly definitions and sample sentences. Many definitions include illustrations for key words.
• During the Read Along step, important vocabulary words in the story are clickable and shown in blue font. By clicking a word, a student learns the meaning of the word.
• In the Quiz step, vocabulary questions reinforce, extend, and evaluate students’ understanding of key words.
• While playing the Wordtastic vocabulary activity, students learn additional words and explore their relationships with available audio support.

The Quiz and Pass steps provide modeling and opportunities to teach and reinforce academic language through use of various question types. Questions utilize academic language and sentence stems to reinforce the vocabulary and grammatical structures common to formal writing.

1. Teach students to recognize and manipulate segments of sound in speech.

2. Teach students letter-sound relations.

3. Use word-building and other activities to link students’ knowledge of letter–sound relationships with phonemic awareness.

During the Introduction and Look, Listen, Respond steps of exercises, students are guided to listen to the sounds before applying the instruction to print.

The Word Warm-ups Live Phontastic wait-time activity utilizes questions with either auditory or visual prompts to reinforce and provide practice using letter-sound knowledge and skills (for example, identifying and matching beginning sounds or rhymes).

The Word Warm-ups Spelling step provides students with opportunities to make words from audio prompts with immediate corrective feedback.

1. Teach students to blend letter sounds and sound–spelling patterns from left to right within a word to produce a recognizable pronunciation.

2. Instruct students in common sound–spelling patterns.

3. Teach students to recognize common word parts.

4. Have students read decodable words in isolation and in text.

In the Read Naturally Live Sequenced series, students read along with Key Words; whereas in both the Read Naturally Live Phonics series and in Word Warm-ups Live, students practice reading lists of words containing featured phonics patterns.

In Read Naturally Live and Word Warm-ups Live, students conduct repeated oral reading of passages containing many decodable words.

5. Teach regular and irregular high-frequency words so that students can recognize them efficiently.

High-frequency words are embedded throughout both Read Naturally Live and Word Warm-ups Live, and students have multiple opportunities to hear, read, and write these words. However, irregular high-frequency words are not explicitly taught.

For explicit instruction in high-frequency words, see the GATE: Reading Intervention for Small Groups and Signs for Sounds programs.

6. Introduce non-decodable words that are essential to the meaning of the text as whole words.

Read Naturally Live provides explicit word preview of Key Words for each story. All story words within the program are clickable with audio support. Vocabulary words are clickable during the Read Along step in both the Phonics and Sequenced series. When clicked, the word, definition, and often a sample sentence are shown with accompanying audio.

For explicit instruction in high-frequency words, including non-decodable words, see the GATE: Reading Intervention for Small Groups and Signs for Sounds programs.

1. As students read orally, model strategies, scaffold, and provide feedback to support accurate and efficient word identification.

While reading during the Cold Timing step of Read Naturally Live, a student clicks on unknown words to hear the correct pronunciation. In addition, this step offers the opportunity for teachers to model strategies, review phonics features, build vocabulary knowledge, or provide other feedback about words read incorrectly to support a student’s word reading.

The Read Along step provides teacher modeling as the student reads along with a proficient reader several times. In order to pass, the student has to read passages or word lists with no more than three errors, so the student is motivated to develop accurate and efficient word identification while completing the steps of the program.

2. Teach students to self-monitor their understanding of the text and to self-correct word-reading errors.

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In Read Naturally Live, students receive multiple methods of feedback and support to build comprehension:

• The student is required to click unknown words in the Cold Timing step. At first, the teacher points out errors, but the student soon becomes proactive at identifying errors before the teacher can tell the student to click the word.
• The Read Along step provides modeling of fluent pronunciations, expression, and phrasing at three customizable recorded speeds.
• Reading for understanding is the purpose of reading. Read Naturally recommends that teachers consider comprehension scores when checking placement, monitoring progression, and deciding when to exit a student from the program. The Quiz step provides students with opportunities to demonstrate and check their understanding; it also provides teachers opportunities to support students in a variety of comprehension skills, such as determining the main idea, making predictions and inferences, using key vocabulary, and more.

3. Provide opportunities for oral reading practice with feedback to develop fluent and accurate reading with expression.

The Practice step utilizes the research-based practice of repeated oral reading of non-fiction passages or word lists. Teachers may provide additional instruction or support during the Pass step while evaluating the student’s practiced reading and assigning an expression score using the scale provided.