The good news is that kids are reading. The average child reads for about 25 minutes a day outside of school. The question is: what are they reading? It turns out they are mainly reading fiction. The imbalance favoring fiction is also mirrored in the classroom. Only about 10% of texts in classroom libraries is nonfiction. On average, even in the classroom, in 2012, students were spending under four minutes a day reading nonfiction.

It is easy to understand why kids prefer reading fiction. It is the ultimate escapist pastime. They can leave their mundane, sometimes stressful, world behind and take a journey to the center of the earth, to a school for wizards, or experience a time and place that is different from their own.

However, the truth is that nonfiction reading skills are needed to be successful in this time and place, in everyday lives and careers. According to a 2012 ACT study, there are three essential skills required in 98% of jobs paying a sufficient wage to support a family. Those skills are applied mathematics, locating information, and reading for information. Notably, two of the three skills are nonfiction reading skills. So, while reading fiction is fun and builds valuable social-emotional qualities such as empathy, it doesn’t fully provide the reading skills needed to obtain gainful employment in the real world.

Accordingly, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for English Language Arts (ELA) and Literacy in History or Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects require an increase in nonfiction reading. The CCSS requires a fifty-fifty balance between informational and literary reading in kindergarten through fifth grade.

The standards strongly suggest that these texts are selected to provide students with a well-rounded knowledge base across subject areas. That means that teachers are encouraged to choose texts addressing historical, social, scientific, and technical subjects at every grade level. In sixth through 12^th grade, that balance shifts in favor of nonfiction with a seventy-thirty split. Bear in mind that this is a split across a child’s school day. English and language arts teachers may find themselves using more fictional texts than their counterparts in other subjects.

Nonfiction Reading Strategies for Older Students

There are two broad approaches to teaching nonfiction reading strategies to older students, such as high school students and beyond. One of them is a content-area literacy approach, and the other is a disciplinary literacy approach.

Content-Area Literacy Approach

The content-area literacy approach advocates for teaching reading and writing processes that are common across disciplines. It teaches students to interpret texts using broad skills such as making predictions, summarizing, and using word-analysis strategies. These skills are implemented across all subjects.

Content-area literacy also teaches older students to compose and revise texts using standard processes such as brainstorming, organizing ideas, revising, and editing. Again, these are not discipline-specific. They can be used for any composition task, from a narrative to a lab report.

Disciplinary Literacy Approach

The disciplinary literacy approach advocates for teaching students goals and practices that are unique to specific disciplines. Disciplinary literacy works to increase access to deep content knowledge, giving students “insider” status as scientists, mathematicians, sociologists, musicians, athletes, and more.

According to Rachel Gabriel and Christopher Wenz, in “Three Directions for Disciplinary Literacy”, published in the February 2017 issue of Literacy in Every Classroom, there are two broad approaches to teaching discipline-specific literacy. One of them involves teaching students discipline-specific strategies. For instance, teachers might choose authentic, disciplinary texts. This may mean avoiding textbooks and choosing actual texts from the field. By doing this, students learn how experts argue using the rules of their field, supporting their claims with evidence, and using technical language.

Modeling Expert Practices

Modeling expert practices requires teachers to be experts. For example, a science teacher may think out loud to students as they read data to conclude an experiment; a social studies teacher shows students how they might confirm the authenticity of a primary document. These are all nonfiction reading skills that require specific disciplinary expertise.

Encouraging Full Participation

The other broad approach is encouraging full participation in the discipline, outside of reading and writing skills. This project-based learning happens with the objective of accomplishing a real-world task, not becoming better readers and writers. For instance, if a class is planning a fundraiser for new playground equipment, they might learn to become better readers by reading about the safest and most fun playground equipment available. Then they become better writers by crafting fundraising emails and press releases to accomplish their goal of buying new playground equipment. The learning happens in the context of a real-life objective.

Neither content-area literacy nor disciplinary literacy stands alone as a good nonfiction reading approach. Both yield positive results and should be used in tandem to provide optimal results for students, both in and out of the classroom.

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Reading is huge, and the concern about reading and strategies for helping students through the summer should be huge as well. “Academically, children who are not reading on grade level by the end of third-grade struggle in every class, year after year, because over 85 percent of the curriculum is taught by reading,” according to the Reading Foundation.

Furthermore, independence in life depends on one’s ability to read. A few instances in which one uses reading skills in life, after academic purposes in schools, include: understanding mail or email, reading and understanding owner’s manuals, completing various forms and applications, reading and understanding bank statements and insurance policies, following signs when driving, attending to directions and warnings inside buildings, comprehending maps, communicating with schools, clinics, agencies, and more, etc.

Struggling readers and non-readers are at risk of the following: becoming unmotivated in school, struggling with behavior problems in the classroom, failing grade-level assessments, becoming school dropouts, getting involved in crime, earning lower wages, being unemployed, and being dependent on others as adults. In essence, reading and students’ abilities to read dictate their trajectories for school success and independence as adults.

Why have Some Students Fallen Behind in Reading Skills?

Students who fall behind in reading do so for one or more reasons. The particular reason or reasons are not as easy to determine as one might imagine. After all, possibilities that contribute to reading difficulties abound.

Reading difficulties result from various practices or lack thereof in schools, homes, and biological make-ups. Schools must differentiate instruction for children with various learning needs, ensure a rigorous and relevant curriculum, vary text genres, levels, and topics, instruct in all five components of reading, promote students’ reading interests and motivation, work to identify learning disabilities or learning difficulties, monitor students’ progress and respond appropriately, and more. Failure to effectively do any of these things can lead to gaps in reading.

In homes, parents or guardians must ensure children are exposed to vocabulary, engage in conversations, model good reading habits, read aloud to young children, ask questions, provide reading materials, practice reading with children, listen to children read, and more. Failure to engage in these reading-related activities can lead to gaps in children’s abilities to read.

Finally, reading difficulties are sometimes the result of learning disabilities or other genetic realities. Sometimes, reading challenges are evident from one generation to the next.

What is the Achievement Gap in Reading/Literacy?

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, “Achievement gaps occur when one group of students (e.g., students grouped by race/ethnicity, gender) outperforms another group and the difference in average scores for the two groups is statistically significant (i.e., larger than the margin of error).” The disparity in performance can manifest as differences in test scores, dropout rates, rates of college acceptance, and more.

Learning gaps, or the difference between a students’ actual performance and the student’s expected performance at their current grade level and time of year in that grade level, can contribute to larger achievement gaps. Learning and achievement gaps can decrease when students’ reading achievement increases.

Reading Strategies for How to Close the Achievement Gap

With the variety of contributors to achievement and learning gaps, one wonders about closing such gaps. Just as causes are numerous, strategies for closing the gaps are numerous. Demographic changes, policy changes, and systems changes in schools, districts, and states help close achievement gaps on a large scale.

Within schools and classrooms, implementing evidence-based instruction, rigorous curriculum, progress monitoring, and professional development are a few necessities to impact achievement and learning gaps. In homes, parents and guardians can help close learning gaps for individual students with a few significant changes or additions to repeated practices at home. Such practices involve:

Motivating students to read.

Exposing children to rich vocabulary.

Reading with and to children.

Teaching phonics and phonemic awareness skills.

Having conversations with children.

Motivation is moving. Adults and children are more likely to engage in activities that motivate them. People engage in intrinsically or extrinsically rewarding activities, things that pique their curiosity, and things to which they can relate. To encourage children to read, try allowing them to choose the text’s topics and genres.

Also, establish a reward system for reading engagement. For example, after every fifth book a student reads, they get a snack of their choice. Or, for each book one reads, they get a sticker on a chart; when the chart is complete, the child receives a prize. Motivation drives people to action, so motivating children to read helps decrease the likelihood of reading gaps.

Another strategy for helping close reading gaps is exposing children to a rich vocabulary. Texts of all kinds are composed of words and are laced with words that are known and unknown. The more words children know, the better they can comprehend passages, stories, and other text formats.

Next, reading to and with children from the womb and beyond improves children’s chances of successfully reading. Hearing fluent reading and practicing fluent reading are keys to reading. In an analogous example: professional basketball players watching great basketball games and great players and then later practicing appropriately and consistently are practices that contribute to the greatness of the pros. Reading is very similar; watching and practicing excellence are steps to being excellent.

Another strategy for closing learning gaps in reading is practicing phonics and phonemic awareness. Basic or foundational phonics skills include letter recognition and letter-sound fluency. Seeing letters and quickly making their sounds are keys to decoding, which is crucial to reading. Phonemic awareness is the manipulation of sounds without any print. An example is to play verbal rhyming word games. Another example is to make sounds and have students blend the sounds to make words. For instance, make the sounds /b/ /o/ /x/ and have children say “box.” This is a blending activity, and blending sounds is another key to reading.

Finally, having conversations with children aids in their verbal skills, vocabulary acquisitions and usage, and ultimately their comprehension. One cannot learn words without hearing and using them.

In conclusion, reading is a foundational skill—foundational to academic success and ultimately a life of independence. Therefore, employing reading strategies over the summer and beyond is crucial in the lives of children.

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Unfortunately, reading can be a skill that many children struggle to master. In order for all of our students to be confident readers, we as teachers can provide our students with a few effective teaching strategies for reading. By implementing these teaching strategies, we are giving our students the tools that can help them succeed. Here are five of the most effective teaching strategies for reading that elementary teachers can use with their primary learners.

1. Graphic Organizers as Teaching Strategies

Graphic organizers are incredible teaching tools that have been used in the classroom for decades. Even before all of the new, fancy organizers, teachers would ask their students to fold their papers in half and use the two sides to compare and contrast content. Educators like the fact that graphic organizers enable students to visually see the connections they are reading.

There is no doubt that each student in your classroom absorbs information in a different way. With a classroom full of diverse learners, a graphic organizer can help to address each individual’s needs. While one student may benefit from using a Venn diagram, another may benefit from using a semantic map.

There are a several different graphic organizers to choose from, such as KWL charts to sequencing events. You can even create your own to suit the needs of the concept or student.

2. Incorporating Technology

Many teachers can confidently say that they have not come across a student that didn’t like to use technology. Technology has become such an integral part of all of our lives that it would seem like a disadvantage not to use it as a reading strategy in the classroom. Aside from the obvious choice of utilizing a tablet so students can read and play games within the apps, there are many other pieces of technology that can help students excel at reading. There are websites like PBSkids.org that offer a variety of different reading games with characters the students are familiar with. There is also Seussville.com, which offers students interactive games that bring the Dr. Seuss characters to life. In addition to apps and websites, there are activities that you can use on your Smartboard as well.

The inherent understanding that our students have for technology and the way that they all excel so quickly about all things technology makes integrating it as a reading strategy extremely engaging.

3. Activating Prior Knowledge

As you know, when you get your students to connect what they are learning to something that they already know, there is a better chance that they will understand it better and remember it longer. To help activate students’ prior knowledge, try asking them a few questions: “What do you know about this topic?” and “How can you relate this to your own life?” These types of questions help students personally connect to the text. When children care about something, they become more connected to it, which in turn helps them excel academically. Here are a few more questions to help students connect with their text.

• What event in your life does this text remind you of?
• How can you connect the text to something that happened in the past?
• Do any of these characters remind you of anyone you know?
• Does this topic remind you of anything or sound familiar to you?

4. Using a Word Wall

A word wall is much more than just a classroom display; it’s an effective strategy that can help promote literacy for primary learners. Teachers not only use them to help enhance the classroom curriculum but to provide students with reference and support, to teach essential language skills, and to help students learn site words and patterns. Besides being a direct visual that students can reference throughout the day, teachers use word walls by incorporating various activities. Here are a few favorites.

I Am Thinking of a Word – Start with the phrase “I am thinking of a word that …” Then give students clues as to what word you are thinking of. Students must use your clues to determine what word you are thinking of from the word wall.

Spell-A-Shape – For this activity, the teacher would dictate several words from the word wall. When saying a word, the teacher would orally clap or snap for each word that he/she says. Then, the teacher would select a shape (heart, circle, and square) and have students draw this shape on their paper and write the words that were dictated from the word wall repeatedly around that shape.

The Hot Seat – One student is chosen to pick a word for the word wall. Then the other students in the class ask that student questions to try and figure out the word.

5. Student Choice

One of the best reading strategies that you can choose for your students is the ability for them to have a choice in what they read. This is the most effective strategy to get your students to want to read. When you give students a voice and a choice, then they will choose something that is of interest to them. This makes it more likely that they will be motivated and engaged to read the book until the end. Start by asking questions to find out what the students interests and hobbies are. Then you can direct them to the section of books that you think they will be best suited for.

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10 Tips on How to Motivate Students to Love Reading

1. Let students see you read. If you are going to encourage your students to read, then you better make sure you’re leading by example. Instead of grading papers when students are silent reading, read a book. Talk about the book that you are reading with them, and how you can’t wait to read before you go to bed. Try other impactful storytelling activities in your classroom.
2. Allow students to read the whole book before discussing it. Give students the opportunity to read the book before you pull it apart and talk about literary devices. Sometimes when all you do is talk about the plot, setting, or genre, you are taking all the fun and pleasure out of the story. Give students the chance to read it once through, then you can go chapter by chapter and dissect.
3. Invite a local author to class. A great way to promote a love of a reading is to invite an author to your classroom to discuss their book. This may be just the thing to inspire your students to read or even be an author themselves someday.
4. Teach students reading strategies. Many students don’t like to read because it’s hard for them. Teach children reading strategies (i.e. repeated reading) to help them feel confident and read fluently.
5. Set up a book club. Book clubs and reading groups are a great way for students to socialize and share their thoughts. This interaction makes reading so much more enjoyable, and it enhances their comprehension skills.
6. Let students choose their own books. Studies have shown that when students choose their own books, it will boost their reading ability. Make sure you have an abundance of different genres and themes in your classroom library from which students may choose.
7. Use technology to create an e-book. Children love technology, and there is nothing is better than using these tools to get students to love reading. Download an app like Book Creator orebook Magic and have students create their own works. Kids will love sharing their books with their peers, and they can even share their stories digitally.
8. Introduce students to a book series. Whether students are into adventures or fantasy novels, there is a book series for everyone. All you have to do is find out what your students love and get them to read the first selection. Once they get a taste of the set, they will definitely want to keep reading to find out what happens next.
9. Allow students to dislike books. Think of it like Facebook—students can give a “thumbs up” if they like it or a “thumbs down” if they don’t. This will also help you choose future class novels as well.
10. Helps students see the importance of reading. Sometimes just knowing the facts can encourage someone to see their world differently. For example, knowing that maintaining a healthy lifestyle may help us live a longer life can motivate us to make better life choices. Laying out the benefits of reading may be the best way to enhance appreciation and encourage students to pick up a book on their own.

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