RN Bookmark

Spring conferences are fast approaching! As you share your students’ fluency progress with their parents/guardians, point out the ways they can support this progress at home. Consider offering our “fluency at home” letter, which explains to parents how they can use teacher modeling, repeated reading, and progress monitoring at home. Read more

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

Are you looking for a way to quickly and accurately assess your students’ phonics abilities? Look no further than Read Naturally’s Quick Phonics Screener (QPS).

Teachers consistently report that QPS provides highly valuable information through an easy and efficient process. This criterion-referenced assessment is appropriate for kindergartners, adult learners, and all students in between. 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

Now that I have the floor, I’d like to give my two cents on our Idioms series. Here’s the scoop: In the English language, idioms are a dime a dozen. We’re up to our ears in them! Native speakers are old hand at incorporating idioms into conversation, but ELL students are often behind the eight ball. When they hear these silly expressions, they must think we’re off our rockers. These students are probably tearing their hair out trying to understand what we mean! To make a long story short: Idioms are fun for us, but they’re driving our ELL students up the wall. 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

Have you read all the books on your classroom bookshelf? If so, we’re impressed! Many busy teachers don’t have time to vet every single book available for independent reading time. Instead, you may rely on recommendations from other teachers, online reviews, or your knowledge of certain authors and publishers. Some of your most valuable book reviews, however, could come from your students themselves. 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

How do we teach students to comprehend what they read? Educators have explored this question for decades. They've implemented strategies, developed lessons, and gained insights into what seems to work and what doesn't. Until recently, however, the question of comprehension was not explored in terms of what happens in our brains when we understand what we read. Today, thanks to advancements in neuroscience, we’re able to add this piece to the puzzle. Read more