First Grade Readers With All the Programs, How...

Thank you for your inquiry.

I will merely try to frame the questions that might help you think through your situation.

Do you have a district reading supervisor? Have you discussed the problem with her or him?

Has your district already purchased a reading program? I assume you have begun to increase your students’ reading ability since we are several weeks into the school year.

Do you respect the knowledge and experience of your colleagues in your school district? Have you discussed “what works well” with them? What are they using for instructional materials and methods?

Are reading test results available to provide objective data regarding your students’ kindergarten experience and their entering reading levels?

Is there an opportunity to consult with the college reading professors who taught you how to teach first grade reading for their advice on appropriate methods and materials?

Best wishes. Teaching can be rewarding, but I cannot promise you it will be easy.

Arthur

Thank you for your inquiry.

I will merely try to frame the questions that might help you think through your situation.

Do you have a district reading supervisor? Have you discussed the problem with her or him?

Has your district already purchased a reading program? I assume you have begun to increase your students’ reading ability since we are several weeks into the school year.

Do you respect the knowledge and experience of your colleagues in your school district? Have you discussed “what works well” with them? What are they using for instructional materials and methods?

Are reading test results available to provide objective data regarding your students’ kindergarten experience and their entering reading levels?

Is there an opportunity to consult with the college reading professors who taught you how to teach first grade reading for their advice on appropriate methods and materials?

Best wishes. Teaching can be rewarding, but I cannot promise you it will be easy.

Arthur

Well, first look at the recommendations of the National Reading Panel (available through the LD In Depth page on this site).

Look for a program that has a strong skills/decoding/phonics sub-program as a central (but not the only) part — NOT a program that does a little phonics trivia and games on the side, and NOT one that claims to do everything under the sun with phonics as the last on a list of twelve parts.
*OR* get a strong phonics stand-alone program and use it in parallel with a good basal reader in the beginning stages, good literary collections or youth novels after Grades 3-4 (this is what I do).

For the readers, this sounds like a “duh” statement, but after seeing the things I have seen it has to be said: look for readers that actually have something to read in them! Avoid picture books with only a couple of words on each page, and trivia books with a few disjointed sentences thrown in around a bunch of cartoons. Look for beginner books that work up from single words and sentences to short paragraphs, and books for older students with large blocks of text and illustrations on the side, not the other way around.
For the learning stages (K-2 at least), I strongly recommend controlled-vocabulary readers with high-frequency words presented and practiced first. Avoid flash, go for solidity.
If you can get a series with good workbooks that teach comprehension in a gradual planned progression, moving from identifying and circling pictures at the very beginning stages through copying words through full-sentence answers, this is excellent.
Read through the stories and make sure the attitudes presented are those you want to model and teach, as well.

All the effective reading programs have a lot in common, and none of them has the one and only one answer. You need thorough, planned, systematic teaching of decoding, guided oral reading, lots of practice, vocabulary teaching, comprehension teaching (direct teaching rather than pious hope), and planned, systematic teaching of writing, which works best if the spelling and decoding are tied together. And please teach handwriting skills and directionality, pious hope fails here too. After that, go wioth good pedagogy in general, choose something that teaches in gradual step-by-step fashion and has as much variety and interest as possible.

If you want my collected works from LDOnline and others, a bunch of how-to-teach reading notes growing into a book, just email me at [email protected]