How Do You Support Struggling Readers in Your Classroom?

Discuss one of the following key support areas presented in this module. The questions listed below each topic are designed to prompt your discussion about this key support. Your response should be well thought out and reference materials, resources, and authors utilized in this module or resources you have accessed in the past.

Increasing the Volume of Reading
1. Do your students have access to a large variety of text - high interest, magazines, newspapers, internet?
2. Is your school committed to building classroom libraries with content-related text?
3. How many minutes a day do your students read in your classroom? Other classes?
4. What are the daily reading expectations for students in your classes? Other classes?
5. Do your students understand why they are reading? Do you set a purpose for their reading?
6. How can we help colleagues across the content areas understand that they are literacy teachers as well?

Building Vocabulary
1. What word attack strategies do you explicitly instruct to your students?
2. How do you teach vocabulary?
3. Do your colleagues build content area word walls and glossaries for their subject area?

Explicit Instruction of Reading Comprehension Strategies
1. What strategies have you utilized in the past to reinforce effective behaviours before, during, and after reading?
2. How can we best make visible to students that reading is a series of effective behaviours and part of an on-going and recursive process?