Teaching elementary reading is one of the most rewarding parts of teaching. If you learn the skills and practices on how to teach reading then your students will be successful. These are a few things you must know to teach reading effectively.

1. Decoding

Decoding is the ability to use letter sound relationships to pronounce written words.

I cannot stress enough how important it is for students to be able to decode and to be able to do it fluently.

Sometimes teachers may not recognize that students are using memory to read words and they think students are reading but they’re not.

Students need to be explicitly taught how to decode and then have meaningful practice with decodable books. 

Students need to master decoding in kindergarten and 1^st grade to be successful in reading. It will take a lot of practice on the students’ part and patience on the teacher’s part for the student to master decoding. The Florida Center for Reading Research has some great activities for students to practice decoding. 

2. Comprehension

Comprehension is the ability to understand what is being read. A lot of students will read a text and not be able to tell you what happened or make any connections.

Students should be able to retell the story or give the main idea in their own words to show understanding.

I want to add that students should be able to articulate their thoughts about reading in complete sentences and a paragraph. This relates to the fact that students should be reading to learn in 2^nd grade and above.

Graphic organizers helps students to retell and recount stories.

3. Fluency

Fluency contains three components:

1. Accuracy: how correctly student reads the words,
2. Rate: student reads at a reasonable rate, not to fast and not too slow.
3. Expression: student pays attention to and reads punctuation marks such as periods, exclamation points and commas.

Fluency is a critical piece that gets overlooked in the elementary grades, unfortunately. There are fluency norms that need to be met at the end of each grade level beginning in first grade. You can get the Hasbrouck and Tindal fluency norms here.

Paired reading and repeated reading are just a few strategies to help in this area.

To sum up:

The three areas are: fluency, decoding and comprehension. If your students are struggling in reading then you will need to assess these areas to see exactly where the problem lies.

When teaching reading be sure to include all these areas in your instruction.

Check out the free Classroom Management Plan Template or the new Mini-Training on Classroom Management