Skip to main content

Even when not lots, some helps.

Here is an interesting situation, a Renaissance Learning the people who make Accelerate Reader report titled What Kids are Reading found that just having struggling readers read for about five minutes a day resulted in measurable improvement.

" found that roughly 200,000 of the 1.4 million fifth graders in its student database began the 2014-15 school year reading at a very low level, among the bottom quarter of fifth graders nationally. Most of them finished the school year in this unfortunate category. But 28 percent of these students somehow got out of the bottom quarter by year’s end. And a smaller subset of those students — five percent of the 200,000 — did something spectacular: in less than a year, they were reading as well as the top 50 percent of fifth graders."

"it does know that these spectacular students read an average of 19 minutes a day on the software. By contrast, the kids who remained at the bottom read only 14.3 minutes a day. Over the course of fifth grade, the catcher-uppers read 341,174 words. That’s 200,000 more words that those who remained strugglers." (Barshay 2015)

Vocabulary Exposure InfographicSo more is better, but some at least does help. One thing then that might be possible for teachers would be to start serializing some text and sending that to their students on a regular/daily basis, adding to that daily reading amount. I've been doing that with some of my undergrads to get them to read, but it can be done with lots of books that are in the public domain and using the student's own smart phone. There are  online services that you could use if you don't want to break up the book yourself, DailyLit and DripRead. Both of these services let you select from a collection and choose the book that will be delivered to your (or a student's) email address on a daily basis.

DailyLit: https://dailylit.com/ 
DripRead: http://www.dripread.com/ 

Both services are free, and DripRead does allow you to upload your own ebooks. For my own classes I had them do a reading analysis to get their average time and then adjusted the amount to be more inline with their reading speed, so that they were reading between 5 and 10 minutes of our text every school day.

Every little bit helps.

Report: Reading 4.7 minutes daily can help students improve
Teachers typically recommend students read between 20 and 30 minutes daily. However, reading for just 4.7 minutes each day may help struggling readers improve, according to a recent report of students who practiced reading using the online software program Accelerated Reader. The Hechinger Report (11/16/2015)
.https://www.learnalytics.com/wkar/

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Auto Summarization

In dealing with textbooks and students with disabilities, one of the most common things that we would do is to get the textbook in a digital format, as an ebook. By doing this we were able to use a number of tools based on the need of the student. I've had students who could not lift their physical printed textbook, but would be able to access though a laptop installed in their electronic wheelchair, for students with vision issues we could boost the font size or use a text-to-speech tool to have the book read aloud to them. One tool that I used with a number of my students who had issues was the Auto Summarize tool in Word. The tool works well with textbook, but wouldn't work for other texts, such as novels.  I used this to reduce the amount of text that they had to read, the "cognitive load" of the text, but would still enable be able to get the information. Word did a great job, and depending on the student I would reduce the text to about 66% for facts and support...
7 comments
Read more

Ebooks as Textbooks - Part 2 - Highlighting

Highlighting can be a very effective tool in reading and learning no matter the kind of text being read: from novels to textbooks. Most textbooks or other forms of information text will usually used text features along with graphics to help organize information presented in the text.  These elements are done to help focus attention on important or key concepts and provide additional information. The text organization itself can include structural elements such as heading, subheading, index, glossary, paragraph spacing, bulleted or numbered lists, sidebars or side boxes, italics, underlines or bold for words or even sections. Graphic content can include the use of symbols, colors, illustrations, pictures, diagrams, charts, and graphs. Poor highlighting design - too much text has been highlighted.  The act of highlighting is less time consuming and much easier than note-taking ( to be discussed in an upcoming posting). To be ...
1 comment
Read more

StoryBots - free for early childhood teachers

Pre-K and Kindergarten teachers can have free access to StoryBots from  http://www.storybots.com/educate  . StoryBots Classroom offers an expansive new suite of classroom-ready activities and resources,including: Math Skills – Common Core-aligned kindergarten-level math games  Learning Videos – a library of 110+ animated musical videos that explore a wide range of topics  Starring You® and Learning Books – 90+ eBooks that help kids practice reading  Starring You® Videos – offering fun, quick and personalized reward for the classroom and can be used for brain breaks  Activity Sheets – 20 printable books and 350+ sheets for teachers to use in their classrooms  Teacher Tools – including Class Roster, Lesson Planner, Group Builder — to help educators manage their classroom and create custom plans.
Post a Comment
Read more