Support for Struggling Readers

Urban Fiction. Hip-Hop Lit. Street Stories.  “Urban literature for young adults puts human faces to the lives behind the statistics, reminding teen readers — both those who live [...]

Once the mainstay of Language Arts classrooms, the whole-class, one-size-fits-all novel study is falling out of favour. In our increasingly diverse classrooms, having everyone in the class read [...]

By the time students are in high school, there is up to a four-year achievement gap between the affluent and the poor. Practically the entire gap is attributable to summer reading loss.   [...]

Shared Reading is a time-honored tradition in primary classrooms for students who are just learning to read. But is there a place for Shared Reading in upper grades? Shared Reading is an [...]

National Humor Month was created in April 1976 to bring public awareness to the therapeutic value of humor. Scientific research shows that when we laugh, we reduce stress and pain, build up our [...]

It’s been said that the Sports Section has the highest readability of any section of the Newspaper! I can believe it, for two reasons: People and Jargon. People’s names are [...]

For most adult readers, the cover of a book doesn’t matter much. But for struggling students, the book’s appearance is a top priority.  Does it look like I’ll be able to read [...]

Let’s face it, some of our students are never going to love writing (or reading or science or math), no matter what we do.  But writing makes you smarter – in every subject. And [...]

As warm weather beckons, how can we keep kids engaged in authentic learning till summer break?  My favorite year-end task is the Multigenre Research Project – an independent learning [...]

It’s the nature of our profession that the best teachers are always looking for ways to do things better, smarter, and more effectively, both for themselves and their students. Even if you [...]

We all have different tolerances for fear. Some people go out of their way to confront scary situations; others do their best to avoid them. But all of us can experience “manageable fear” through [...]

The fifth-grader in our family recently informed me that she’s reading the Nancy Drew series. The original series ran from 1930 until 2003, then was recently reprised as an updated series [...]

There’s nothing like a good survival story: The conflict is clear, the stakes are as high as they get, and you know exactly what you’re rooting for.      –Todd Olson, The Children’s Book [...]

We’ve all seen the cute videos on social media of primary teachers giving their students a hug, a handshake or a high five outside the classroom door.  But did you know that PGD – [...]

Recently, a friend shared this story of her 10 year-old granddaughter who has difficulty with reading.  The students were required to take turns reading aloud to the class, and when [...]

In a recent HIP TIP, I defined “tween” readers as “beyond picture books but not yet ready for complicated novels.” Needless to say, I got a lot of pushback from [...]

On long car trips, I would often read to my husband as he drove. I couldn’t believe how often I made a mistake! (Surprisingly often, they involved “mis-guessing” a hyphenated [...]

Counting the number of words a student can read in a minute has become a popular method of measuring that student’s reading fluency. It’s certainly well established that slow, choppy [...]

It’s generally accepted these days that the best way to teach reading comprehension is to focus on the strategies good readers use to make sense of text. In fact, I call comprehension [...]

“Make a prediction about what is going to happen in this book.”  This has probably been the most popular pre-reading routine in schools for time eternal. But in a recent HIP TIP on [...]

I was once asked to judge a public speaking contest (remember those?) in which a middle grade student spoke about the author R.L. Stine. “Goosebumps was the first book I ever read all the way [...]

Poor old Emmett Betts is getting a pretty bad rap these days. Betts was the guy who introduced us to independent, instructional and frustration reading levels almost 70 years ago. Betts [...]

The “Think-Pair-Share” model was developed over 30 years ago to help students clarify and articulate their thinking. Its power has been documented in many research studies, and for good reason. [...]

The ORAL READING RECORD, otherwise known as a Running Record or Informal Reading Inventory, is the best tool for assessing what our students know and can do as readers. An Oral Reading Record [...]

“An ineffective teacher disciplines. An effective teacher manages.” So says classroom management expert Harry Wong, who attests that discipline shouldn’t be necessary in [...]

Did you know that messy handwriting can adversely affect academic performance?  Writing expert Steve Graham suggests that bad penmanship can tank test scores from the 50th to the 16th percentile [...]

I recently came across an article called “Your Child’s Dyslexia Diagnosis is B.S.”  by Julian Elliot, a professor of Education at Durham University in the UK.  According to Elliot, dyslexia is [...]

Part of me believes that kids should be able to read whatever they want during SSR (Sustained Silent Reading) Time, whether it’s magazines, manuals or comic books – as long as they’re reading [...]

Confession: I am a recovering test developer.  But those two years I spent as the lead consultant on a large-scale reading test taught me a lot about the assessment/evaluation process. And my [...]

I used to be able to sit with my nose buried in a book for hours on end. These days, I can hardly go for 15 minutes without becoming interrupted or distracted. I blame the internet. I get my news [...]

Teacher “workshops” have been getting a bad rap lately. After all, we know that sustained professional development is more effective and longer-lasting than the “one-shot” [...]

Wait Time refers to the period of silence between the time a question is asked and the time when the question is answered.  Research tells us that, on average, we teachers give students less than [...]

…and other lessons learned about getting students to think more deeply. My grandson has just returned from his first week at Kindergarten and he tells me that one of the most important [...]

I often tend to use the words “struggling” and “reluctant” readers in one breath.  But the reality is that not all of our reluctant readers are struggling. And, as one ELL [...]

…to students who weren’t even born in 2001? When High Interest Publishing first received the manuscript for TERROR 9/11, we were hesitant.  Some of us wondered if publishing the novel [...]

Never end a sentence with a preposition. And never start a sentence with “AND”. These golden rules of writing were drummed into most of us in school – and many of us still teach them to our [...]

In a BBC article that’s gone viral on the Internet, author Mark Forsyth describes a number of ways that fluent speakers of English instinctively apply rules of word order just because they [...]

Questions about the writer’s purpose appear on virtually every reading test and we often teach students the acronym PIE:  Persuade, Inform or Entertain.  But why does it matter? Several [...]

Just because HIP novels are geared to struggling readers doesn’t mean we don’t sneak in some literary devices here and there. And one of our favourites is the tricolon, or, as we like [...]

Over 80 years ago, Louise Rosenblatt postulated that the process of making meaning from print involves a transaction between the words on the page and the knowledge, beliefs and biases of the [...]

Several years ago, I was part of a team developing a large-scale reading assessment. When we were field-testing different types of tasks and text forms, we were surprised to see that our high [...]

Whenever I open this can of worms, I get feedback saying that boys can, should and will read whatever girls read.  And I don’t disagree! But here’s one fact no one can argue with: the [...]

I confess I have a phobia about homophones.  You know, those tricky words that sound the same, but are spelled differently and have different meanings.   Mixing homophones is one of the [...]

“Does spelling count?” Does this question drive anyone else crazy? Of course spelling counts!  Would they spell a word differently depending on whether its spelling [...]

I was once asked by a group of teachers, “How many sentences should there be in a paragraph?”   I was a little taken aback by the question but replied, “It depends on the [...]

Round-robin reading – every student taking turns reading aloud from a passage – has been something of a time-honoured tradition in schools.  But in a rare act of unanimity, reading [...]

High interest/low vocabulary books tend to get a bad rap sometimes.  That’s because all too often they’re neither very interesting nor very easy to read. When looking for good hi-lo [...]

Most of us like to start with some sort of assessment of what our students know and can do.  The last few HIP TIPs have been geared toward helping you do just that.  The “Love it or Loathe [...]

Part of me believes that kids should be able to read whatever they want during SSR (Sustained Silent Reading) Time, whether it’s magazines, manuals or comic books – as long as they’re reading [...]