How To Teach Reading In The Classroom 10 Strategies

Teaching a student to read is arguably one of the most important functions of the teaching profession. The ability to read, and read for comprehension, opens up an entire world of possibilities and opportunities for children to discover new worlds and learn new concepts. And while teaching reading is such a high priority, some teachers who aren’t specially trained in the practice find themselves seeking additional help. The good news is that there are many instructional strategies to teach reading that nearly any educator can implement. Here are 10 of the most popular and some quick reference reading resources to add to your repertoire. Before you can effectively teach reading, it’s vital that you understand the primary components of reading instruction.

When broken down into the five major elements, reading instruction is a much more approachable and easily understood skill. The five elements of reading instruction are: Phonics: the relationship between letters and the different sounds they make. This can be in relation to single letters or groupings of letters. Phonemic awareness: an understanding of how consonant or vowel sounds can be arranged to make words. Examples of phonemic awareness include being able to identify words that rhyme, recognizing alliteration, segmenting a sentence into words, identifying the syllables in a word, and blending and segmenting onset-rimes.

As educators, you’ve all experienced it. Some students take to reading quickly; others slog through, sounding out every letter, struggling to blend sounds or make sense of text. As national reading scores dip and classrooms fill with more diverse learners than ever, literacy tops the minds of all educators. How do you help all students master reading? In this article, learn how to apply science of reading strategies and transform student literacy in your classroom, including 10 classroom strategies to effectively teach the five essential components of reading. It proves 95% of all students—from all abilities and backgrounds—can learn to read when taught with evidence-based instruction in the five essential components of reading:

Phonemic awareness: Recognizing the sounds (phonemes) in a word to transition into phonics Coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools face the challenges of stakeholders being unprepared to address learning needs systematically that resulted from the sudden shift to remote learning. Not that remote learning doesn’t work, but rather small and large districts alike (and families!) weren’t prepared or resourced to deliver and receive quality programming in a totally new way. Categorically, math and reading test scores plummeted to all-time lows, with grave disparities and learning loss among the most disenfranchised populations of students. Therefore, it’s no surprise that educators have doubled down on sharpening their own skill sets for teaching reading strategies and literacy skills and supporting students’ families to do the same at home. With a renewed focus on the Science of Reading, there are several ways to encourage not only a strong foundation for literacy but also a love for reading.

While many equate literacy with reading, developing literacy skills actually encompasses listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The focus on reading comes from the fact that while human brains are wired to speak, they are not wired to read and write. Reading development is not a natural process, and therefore kids do not learn to read as they learn to talk. The reading process can be considered a form of linguistic gymnastics, highlighting how unnatural the pursuit is and why it requires rigorous instruction. Hence, the shift towards the teaching of reading relies on the decades of research behind the Science of Reading. Reading and literacy hold paramount significance within the classroom, serving as the cornerstone of effective education.

Reading comprehension is the gateway to acquiring knowledge across all subjects, allowing students to grasp complex concepts, explore diverse perspectives, and engage critically with the curriculum. Literacy skills foster improved communication, both written and oral, enabling students to express their ideas articulately and engage in meaningful classroom discussions. According to Reading Rockets, key predictors in preschool for reading and school success are: Such reading skills and strategies can strengthen self-expression, interpersonal communication and relationships, reading comprehension, and a readiness to learn. Louisa Moats famously said, “Teaching reading is rocket science,” which leaves us educators wondering how and where do we begin? Educators across the United States are asking the same questions with one goal in mind: How do we create lifelong readers?

In this article, I’ll be using my experience as a first-grade teacher to shed light on the Five Pillars of Reading and my top 10 instructional strategies for reading that help support my daily... Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify sounds that make up our words. By understanding how spoken language works, students will be able to transfer the knowledge to phonics, word work activities, encoding, and decoding in text. Phonemes are all about the sounds—rhyming, isolating phonemes, blending, and manipulating sounds are all great ways to incorporate phonemic awareness with students. Word play activities can range from rhyming to manipulating phonemes and can be done in just 5 to 10 minutes! Why Do It: Students understand how spoken language works and can make connections between words and their parts.

Spending a short 5 to 10 minutes on word play daily has been a small but mighty change for me. Why Do It: Students are encouraged to listen (hear) each sound in words, which will transfer over to their decoding skills while learning to read. Our library provides effective, research-based classroom strategies to help strengthen your students’ skills in phonological awareness, decoding, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing. All of the reading and writing strategies in our collection are evidence-based and can be adapted for all learners. Many of the strategies support collaborative learning and give your students a chance to work independently and in small groups. Find the strategies that support the specific literacy skills you are teaching — the filters below can help you get started.

As you introduce a strategy, clearly model how the strategy will be used, and let the kids know if they will be working as a whole class, in small groups, or individually. Demonstration and modeling, follow-up independent practice, and class or small group discussion are keys to success. Instruction should encourage active participation and lots of conversation! Reading Rockets is made possible with generous support from the National Education Association. The chart below lists all of the strategies currently in our library. To quickly find the strategies you need, use the filters below.

Of course, people are reading, and we generally don’t hold conversations and read at the same time. And we teachers usually like quiet classrooms, seeing the quiet as indicative of learning taking place. This is true in many cases, of course, but there are some drawbacks to these quiet reading classes: they are not interactive, and it’s been shown that interaction between students and students and teacher... In additions, it’s difficult to impossible to assess learning taking place without some talking; indeed, it’s hard to tell if students in a silent classroom are even reading and not daydreaming or actually nodding... Finally, these quiet noninteractive classes are simply boring, and boredom is not an incentive for students to come to class and learn. However, there are several methods to address these concerns in reading classes by making them interactive and still teach reading.

Knowing your students’ level of instruction is important for choosing materials. Reading should be neither too hard, at a point where students can’t understand it and therefore benefit from it. If students don’t understand the majority of the words on a page, the text is too hard for them. On the other hand, if the student understands everything in the reading, there is no challenge and no learning. So assess your students’ level by giving them short reading passages of varying degrees of difficulty. This might take up the first week or so of class.

Hand out a passage that seems to be at your students’ approximate level and then hold a brief discussion, ask some questions, and define some vocabulary to determine if the passage is at the... If too easy or too hard, adjust the reading passage and repeat the procedure until you reach the students’ optimal level. While it’s important that the material be neither too difficult nor too easy, a text should be at the student’s maturity level as well—it’s inappropriate to give children’s storybooks to adult or adolescent students. There are, however, edited versions of mature material, such as classic and popular novels, for ESL students, that will hold their interest while they develop reading skills. Find out your students’ interest. Often within a class there are common themes of interest: parenting, medicine, and computers are some topics that come to mind that a majority of students in my classes have shared interest in.

Ask students about their interests in the first days of class and collect reading material to match those interests. Teaching reading with texts on these topics will heighten student motivation to read and therefore ensure that they do read and improve their skills. As a child, I attempted, and failed, to read a number of books that were “classics”: Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” leaps to mind. It probably should have been a fairly easy read, but it was so full of cultural references to life in mid-nineteenth century New England that I gave up in defeat each time. It was not at my independent reading level, even if the vocabulary and grammatical patterns were, because of its cultural references. Why, for example, would young schoolgirls lust after limes, as the youngest daughter in the story, Amy, and her friends do?

Cultural material like this would stop me abruptly. Clearly, this was not independent reading for me because of its cultural references, and I needed help to navigate this text—to explain that limes, a citrus fruit, would have been rare and prized a... Similarly, our students, many new to the U.S., would need equal help with such material. It is important for the teacher to anticipate which cultural references students might need explained or discussed. This is not easy, of course, but can become so through such techniques as related discussion before the reading (e.g., “Who knows what the American Civil War was? When was it?

Why was it fought?” or “Where is New England? Have you ever been there? What is the climate like?”) A discussion before the reading on its topics builds background knowledge and the comprehensibility of the text as well as giving the teacher an idea of where students’ background... Today, literacy is not just about learning to read and write; it’s a crucial tool that opens doors to a world of knowledge and opportunities. It’s the foundation upon which we build our ability to communicate, understand, and interact with the world around us. It is the cornerstone that supports all other learning.

Watch your kids fall in love with math & reading through our scientifically designed curriculum. But how do we ensure every student learns to read and write, loves the process, and excels in it? This is where literacy strategies for teachers come into play. In the modern classroom, literacy strategies are essential for several reasons. They help cater to diverse learning styles, engage students more effectively, and promote a deeper understanding of the material. These strategies are vital in an era of abundant information and attention spans are challenged.

They equip teachers with innovative methods to make reading and writing more interactive and meaningful. Comprehension is the goal of reading. If students don’t understand what they read, well, reading is a meaningless activity. The good news: Reading comprehension can be taught, practiced, and mastered. As students become readers, you can teach strategies that students can learn and add to their toolbox. Think about reading comprehension as a combination of skills.

People Also Search

• How to Teach Reading in the Classroom [10 Strategies]
• 10 Teaching Strategies for Teaching Reading (2025)
• 10 Effective Science of Reading Strategies To Use in the Classroom
• 10 Teaching strategies: How to improve students' reading skills
• 10 Literacy Strategies for Teachers To Use in the Classroom
• 10 Science of Reading Strategies for Reading Instruction
• Classroom Strategy Library - Reading Rockets
• How to Teach Reading Skills: 10 Best Practices - BusyTeacher
• 15 Best Literacy Strategies for Teachers to Use in Classroom
• 14 Powerful Reading Comprehension Strategies To Teach Students