RN Bookmark

Students taking high-stakes tests must have the capacity to read for extended periods of time. Whether they’re reading a series of questions, or reading to comprehend a lengthy passage, endurance is crucial to their success. How can we help build reading stamina? Read more

We love providing educators with free resources. Not only do these materials help struggling students, but they tend to make teachers’ lives easier. In recent weeks, we’ve shared free resources to help students correct common spelling errors as well as free resources to help students master visually confusing letters. This week, we’re sharing three free supplemental resources for students working in Read Live and Encore. Read more

In order to know whether a student has made enough progress to exit a Read Naturally program, you need to assess the student with grade-level material. It is important to celebrate your student’s daily growth from cold to hot timings in a story, the student’s goal being increased and the student moving up a level. It is also exciting to see a student’s cold-timing scores increase from story to story. These are all indications that the student’s reading skills are improving and that he or she is making progress in the program. But it is essential to keep the long-term goal in mind. Read more

“Why do you have a level 5.6…What happened to level 5.5?” This question comes into our customer service department fairly frequently, though there’s no official tally. I have actually wondered about this myself! Here is the history on Level 5.6, from one of our original writers:   Read more

The fact that so many students love working in Read Naturally programs brings us great joy. But we are most delighted when students no longer need our programs. The whole point of a Read Naturally intervention is to one day exit the program as a fluent and confident reader. The sooner this day comes for a student, the better! Read more

Here’s some food for thought: When multilingual learners come across common English idioms in text, confusion can hit like a ton of bricks. Although these expressions are second nature for native speakers, they are clear as mud for learners of the English language. Especially when these learners are struggling to read, idioms can add insult to injury. Let’s throw them a bone, shall we? Read more

Every year around this time, we like to remind teachers of the importance of checking their students’ initial Read Naturally placement. After the student completes three to six stories, you have more specific data about how they are performing in both fluency and comprehension. This is the point at which you should check initial placement to see whether adjustments to the initial level and goal are needed.  Read more

One of the things that sets Read Naturally programs apart is our high-interest, nonfiction stories. Struggling readers need to feel motivated to read, so we try to find unique topics that will hold their interest and spark their curiosity. When we read about the work of the nonprofit APOPO, not only were we inspired by its mission, but we knew we had the makings of a great story. Since then, our Rats to the Rescue story in Read Live and Encore II Level 5.6 has become a crowd favorite. Read more

Read Naturally founder Candyce Ihnot likes to tell the story of a little boy who went from struggling to fluent using the Read Naturally program. When Candyce asked the boy how he got to be such a good reader, he said with a smirk, “It was nothing you did.” Rather than be offended by his brutal honesty, Candyce was delighted. The boy was taking due credit for his own accomplishment. He had come to understand that he’d possessed the tools for success all along. Having found the confidence and fortitude to master a huge challenge, he could now draw on those qualities again and again—without his teacher’s help. Read more

Our teacher’s manuals are packed full of useful information about how to implement our programs effectively. They’re extraordinarily well researched and include hundreds of helpful suggestions. Have you read them recently? Cover to cover?

Don’t worry if the answer is no. We know how busy teachers are, and we want to make it easy on you to implement our programs with fidelity. That’s why we’ve created Fidelity Checklists. Download as many as you’d like—they’re free on our website! Read more