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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

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

Happy New Year! We’re kicking off 2017 with some great news. Read Naturally Encore was selected as a District Administration Reader’s Choice Top Product of 2016. District Administration is a reputable source of information for K12 leaders in nearly every district across the country. Their annual awards program highlights the best products in the industry according to the superintendents and other school leaders who are using them in their districts. Read Naturally Encore was one of 100 Top Products chosen from over 1,500 nominations. Read more

Teachers love Read Naturally Strategy programs, first and foremost, because they are so effective in boosting reading achievement. An added bonus is that students work independently for most of the time. However, Read Naturally Strategy programs are not completely independent. The teacher needs to be present at crucial times in order for the strategy to work. Read more

Do your Read Naturally students conduct their cold timings independently? Teachers have different opinions on whether or not they should. Some teachers believe that, in order to get the most accurate data, a teacher should be present during the cold-timing step. Other teachers believe that students should do this step independently in order to practice self-correcting errors. While both points of view are valid, here is Read Naturally's views on cold timings: Read more

In elementary school, I remember participating in a reading incentive program with a simple premise: The more books I read, the more points I’d receive toward a reward. Because of the reward, my classmates and I were highly motivated to spend our free time reading. What’s not to love about a program like that?

There was just one problem. I could read a long, challenging chapter book slightly above my reading level in the same amount of time it took my classmate to read a dozen quick, easy books below his reading level. Who earned more points? My classmate. What did I learn? Quantity beats quality. Don’t challenge yourself.

The program had a fantastic mission, but there was an unintended consequence for me and many other students. Unfortunately, this kind of thing happens often in schools. The only way to avoid it is for teachers to take the time to scrutinize the practices and programs they put to use in their classrooms. Are we doing things out of habit or because others are doing them? Or are we doing things because they truly promote learning? A good educator is one who observes and adjusts—constantly and relentlessly. Read more

Some ELL students learning to read in English may need additional support in the Read Along step of Read Naturally Strategy programs. We've built this extra support into many of our levels for Spanish-speaking ELL students. Read more

I was recently talking with a mother of twins who admitted that her biggest struggle was not having enough one-on-one time with each twin. I thought of classroom teachers and how they struggle with the same thing. Wouldn’t you love to spend more individual time with each of your students? Unfortunately, it’s not always possible. And yet, Read Naturally’s placement procedure requires just that. The placement assessment asks you to sit with one student at a time, sometimes for several minutes. What if you just don’t have time? Read more

Checking initial placement will help ensure optimal success. After a student completes between three and six stories, you need to check to make sure the student’s level and goal are appropriate. To make this task as straightforward as possible, our curriculum experts worked hard to put together detailed guidelines, available for free on our website. Read more

Think back to the beginning of the school year. What did your struggling readers sound like? How was their fluency and comprehension? Now think about these readers today. Do they read more confidently? Have they made significant gains? Read more