Reading for everyone!
Instructional Strategies and Differentiation
We want all of our diverse students to be successful readers in our classroom!
Who do we worry about
Boys Literacy
Why might boys be having trouble
According to a wonderful website geared towards boys literacy, Guys Read, there are many reasons for why boys are struggling more than girls with reading:
- Biologically, boys are slower to develop than girls and often struggle with reading and writing skills early on.
- The action-oriented, competitive learning style of many boys works against them learning to read and write
- Many books boys are asked to read don’t appeal to them. They aren’t motivated to want to read.
- As a society, we teach boys to suppress feelings. Boys aren’t practiced and often don’t feel comfortable exploring the emotions and feelings found in fiction.
- Boys don’t have enough positive male role models for literacy. Because the majority of adults involved in kids’ reading are women, boys might not see reading as a masculine activity.
What can we do?
- give boys more choice in the choice of reading materials
- text rich classroom environments
- classroom library with a variety of texts including non-fiction, graphic novels, and other topics that are of interest to boys, ex. lego books
- involving more movement into the checking understanding or as they are reading
- find male role models for them to connect with - Real Men Read
- and more!
For more ideas, you can check out some amazing Ontario government resources Me Read? No Way! and Me Read? And How! as well as some amazing blogs, Guys Read is all about boys reading, and here you can find a blog post of a father commenting on boys reading that is really insightful!
English Language Learners
What can we do?
One strategy comes to mind on how to best reach these students and help them be successful, differentiation.
Just like this monk has spent his life learning with scrolls, switching to something completely new, the book is a difficult process and required patience, explaining new vocabulary, using simple phrases to express new ideas, modelling and checking for understanding.
Culture in the classroom
How can we reach everyone?
Asking your students and parents to recommend some favourite books can also help you build your classroom library with books for everyone to read!
Differentiation!
What?
The woman, Elizabeth Coelho, makes many links to ELL students and explains the importance of differentiating our instruction, by breaking down tasks, using simple and consistent vocabulary, and a text rich classroom to help them as well as everyone else in the classroom succeed.
The man, Jeffrey Wilhelm, demonstrates how to model strategies using a think aloud. He also explains the importance of going through a task with the students, teaching them how to do something, before just assigning the work using the story of an experience he had with a teacher candidate.
For more information about differentiation, check out this article entitled Differentiating the Learning Environment which includes the following flow chart:
Book ideas
Fox on the Ice by Tomson Highway with illustrations by Brian Deines
It is a story of a family going ice fishing.
I would use this book as a read aloud for text-to-self connections. It is a super amazing book that is written in both English and Cree (Roman orthography). Connection students can share: They also speak another language, they also know another language etc.
ISBN: 9780002255325
I Hate English by Ellen Levine and illustrated by Steve Bjorkman
A great book to read with students who are learning a new language.
ISBN: 9780590423045
LEGO, The lego movie: junior novel by Kate Howard
An ordinary Lego mini figure, mistakenly thought to be the extraordinary master builder, is recruited to join a quest to stop and evil Lego tyrant from gluing the universe together.
Great book for students who enjoy building things with block and lego and those who have watched and enjoyed the Lego movie!
ISBN: 9780545624640