Teaching Reading: Quickstart Guide for Teachers & Caregivers

Explore diverse reading profiles and how connected disabilities, dyslexia, and comprehension difficulties intersect with learning disabilities, ADHD, and processing delays to guide instruction.

Identify the three areas of reading disabilities—comprehension deficits, phonological processing deficits, and rapid naming speed deficits. Recognize overlapping and double deficits to address each deficit.

Identify specific reading comprehension difficulties in students who read words well but struggle with predicting, inferring, and understanding text structure, and apply explicit strategies and vocabulary interventions.

Identify how dyslexia, a neurobiological phonological deficit, impairs accurate and fluent word recognition, decoding, and spelling, and informs evidence-based reading instruction and vocabulary development.

Explore four reading assessment types: screening, diagnostic, progress monitoring, and outcome, and how each informs interventions, with examples and the idea that accurate assessment guides targeted reading support.

Universal screenings cast a wide net to flag potential reading issues. Diagnostic, progress monitoring, and outcome assessments map strengths and weaknesses in phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

Explore screening and diagnostic tools for reading and dyslexia, including dynamic indicators of basic early literacy skills, qualitative reading inventory, and diagnostic tools; discuss teacher roles, cost, and training requirements.

Explore DIBELS, words there way, and the qualitative reading inventory to screen and diagnose phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension, guiding targeted reading interventions.

Explore structured literacy as explicit, systematic, multisensory instruction built on five reading components, compare it to balanced literacy, and learn how phonological awareness and phonics support decoding.

explicit, direct instruction guides systematic, cumulative literacy progression from easy to hard, with teacher-directed, multisensory learning—auditory, visual, and kinesthetic input simultaneous, like hearing, saying, and writing cat.

Explore phonological awareness as the first of the big five, a listening skill across word, syllable, onset rhyme, and phoneme levels, culminating in phonemic awareness and sound blending.

Design and deliver quick, no resources phonological awareness activities aligned with explicit, systematic, cumulative, teacher directed, and multisensory instruction, covering word, syllable, onset rhyme, and phoneme levels in daily sessions.

Phonics overview explains how teaching affects student performance in phonics, regular word reading, and multisyllabic word reading, using a systematic scope and sequence that acknowledges English orthographic depth.

Organize phonics instruction around letters and sounds, then consonant blends, digraphs, and vowel teams, using visual drills with letter cards and multisensory practice.

Practice decoding and encoding with blending cards, manipulative letters, and multisensory word building, then reinforce skills through dictation and word sorts for blends and digraphs.

Explore connected text in reading instruction by contrasting decoded text and level texts, applying phonics patterns and decoding strategies to build reading accuracy and comprehension.

Teach irregular word reading by spelling and naming letters for words that can’t be sounded out, using arm spelling, and focus on high frequency read words that break rules.

Teach multisyllabic word decoding by introducing six syllable types, identifying vowels and consonants, and dividing words between consonants to decode patterns; integrate phonological awareness and phonics across lessons.

Learn how to assess fluency through speed, accuracy, and prosody, and measure vocabulary's role in comprehension, using one-minute oral reading and grade-level norms with a prosody rubric.

Use guided repeated oral reading with feedback to build fluency. Repeat the same text about three to four times, and practice prosody with activities like timed, partner, or reader's theater.

Explore two general categories of vocabulary instruction—incidental exposure and intentional teaching—and learn how rich oral language experiences and wide reading support vocabulary growth with specific word instruction and word-learning strategies.

Teach specific word instruction by selecting tier two vocabulary, contextualizing the word with examples like mischief, giving a student-friendly definition, and engaging students in usage across contexts.

Teach a vocabulary strategy that helps students infer meaning across many words, using student-friendly dictionaries, morphemes, context clues, and cognates to build fluency and comprehension.

Explore how to teach and test comprehension with strategies like metacognition, monitoring, connecting to world knowledge, predicting, recognizing text structure, asking questions, visualizing, and summarizing.

Learn how to summarize both literary and informational texts using a three-part graphic organizer (beginning, middle, end) and the paragraph shrinking strategy to craft a clear main idea.

Explore text structure as a core reading strategy, identifying setting, characters, problem, events, solution, and theme, using graphic organizers to compare literary and informational texts.