Literacy Lookout

With summer break being just days away (woohoo!!), the Literacy Team wanted to take a minute to share some end of year celebrations and what we're looking forward to next year. But before we jump into that, we've said it before, and we'll say it again, we know change is hard but our staff has truly taken the new initiatives and changes this year brought to heart and the growth our students are making is phenomenal! Thank you for all of your hard work and dedication!

We are told that it takes 4 years to see a change. We are currently working on making progress, not perfection. However, when we start seeing percentages in the 80's we know that our Tier 1 instruction is working! What a reason to celebrate.

Our data speaks for itself. Our Tier 1 and Tier 2 decoding instruction is working. We're seeing that our students are now struggling with words read correctly per minute so we'd like to dive into evidence-based fluency interventions and what that can look like! If you're still doing what you were doing ten years ago, it may be time to change the way you view fluency. Remember fluency is NOT fast reading. It is only important as a support for comprehension and motivated reading.

Knowing that comprehension is the outcome when it comes to the Simple View of Reading, adolescents tend to struggle more with understanding and connecting to what they've read. By providing scaffolds for text challenges, students are able to move from a literal level of reading that focuses more on simple recall to a more critical level of reading that includes applying knowledge across multiple texts. Helping all students read challenging texts by using explicit scaffolding strategies allows them to build knowledge, comprehension, automaticity, and engagement. Remember, struggle is not a bad word!