How to Teach Reading to Children, Youth, and Adults
Teaching children and adults how to read is one of the most rewarding life experiences. Reading is the gateway to knowledge and success. By teaching someone how to read, you are literally changing someone’s life. But, do you use the same strategies to teach readers or pre-readers at every age level? Yes and no.
How to Teach Reading to Children, Youth, and Adults: What’s the Same?
1. You’re going to need effective diagnostic assessments that are quick, efficient, reliable, and easy-to-use to determine what is already known. My free multiple choice diagnostic assessments
and recording matrices will serve this purpose (See Free Assessments).
2. You’re going to need to teach these curricular components: spelling, syllabication, phonics, fluency, sight words, vocabulary development, and reading comprehension.
3. You’re going to need a balanced instructional approach, but one targeted to the diagnostic needs of individual students. Each reader or pre-reader is a unique snowflake. Each has existing strengths and weaknesses in phonemic awareness, auditory and visual processing, cognitive ability, life experience, language experience, self-concept, and learning attitude/motivation.
4. You’re going to need lots of books, appropriate to the interest and reading levels of the reader.
5. You’re going to need to be patient.
How to Teach Reading to Children, Youth, and Adults: What’s Different?
1. Reader and pre-reader age levels will determine how you teach reading: See articles under Study Skills for age level learning characteristics.
2. Youth and adults will usually have significantly better oral language skills, so vocabulary instruction may be less of a focus for these readers.
3. Children lack print awareness; whereas youth and adults generally do not. Children need to be taught how to hold a book and the left to right spelling and word patterns.
4. Adults probably have phonemic awareness and alphabetic awareness’ skills; whereas most children do not.
5. Children need reading from scratch instruction; while most youth and adults will progress nicely with targeted, gap-filling reading instruction.
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The Science of Reading Intervention Program
The Science of Reading Intervention Program: Word Recognition includes explicit, scripted, sounds to print instruction and practice with the 5 Daily Google Slide Activities every grades 4-adult reading intervention student needs: 1. Phonemic Awareness and Morphology 2. Blending, Segmenting, and Spelling 3. Sounds and Spellings (including handwriting) 4. Heart Words Practice 5. Sam and Friends Phonics Books (decodables). Plus, digital and printable sound wall cards, speech articulation songs, sounds to print games, and morphology walls. Print versions are available for all activities. First Half of the Year Program (55 minutes-per-day, 18 weeks)
The Science of Reading Intervention Program: Language Comprehension resources are designed for students who have completed the word recognition program or have demonstrated basic mastery of the alphabetic code and can read with some degree of fluency. The program features the 5 Weekly Language Comprehension Activities: 1. Background Knowledge Mentor Texts 2. Academic Language, Greek and Latin Morphology, Figures of Speech, Connotations, Multiple Meaning Words 3. Syntax in Reading 4. Reading Comprehension Strategies 5. Literacy Knowledge (Narrative and Expository). Second Half of the Year Program (30 minutes-per-day, 18 weeks)
The Science of Reading Intervention Program: Assessment-based Instruction provides diagnostically-based “second chance” instructional resources. The program includes 13 comprehensive assessments and matching instructional resources to fill in the yet-to-be-mastered gaps in phonemic awareness, alphabetic awareness, phonics, fluency (with YouTube modeled readings), Heart Words and Phonics Games, spelling patterns, grammar, usage, and mechanics, syllabication and morphology, executive function shills. Second Half of the Year Program (25 minutes-per-day, 18 weeks)
The Science of Reading Intervention Program BUNDLE includes all 3 program components for the comprehensive, state-of-the-art (and science) grades 4-adult full-year program. Scripted, easy-to-teach, no prep, no need for time-consuming (albeit valuable) LETRS training or O-G certification… Learn as you teach and get results NOW for your students. Print to speech with plenty of speech to print instructional components.
Click the SCIENCE OF READING INTERVENTION PROGRAM RESOURCES for detailed program description, sample lessons, and video overviews. Click the links to get these ready-to-use resources, developed by a teacher (Mark Pennington, MA reading specialist) for teachers and their students.
Get the SCRIP Comprehension Cues FREE Resource:
Get the Diagnostic ELA and Reading Assessments FREE Resource:
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