Ready4Reading Evidence Portfolio
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The program also uses writing to help students explore and draw connections from the content being taught. In the Wiley Blevins ’s Teaching Phonics lessons, students are asked to write their retelling of a text after they finish reading a decodable passage. Students are directed to write a story extension, a new story with the same characters, or to simply summarize what they learned from the text. The program provides sentence starters for additional support. Short Read Decodables also work to assess student text comprehension through informative/explanatory, narrative, and opinion writing options. Read to Know Text Sets also include downloadable Respond and Write resources. • Comprehension: Ready4Reading is designed with a structured close reading process to teach essential comprehension skills. In Wiley Blevins's Teaching Phonics and Read to Know Text Sets, before students begin reading texts, teachers guide students in pre-teaching vocabulary. Wiley Blevins ’s Teaching Phonics, Short Read Decodables, and Read to Know Text Sets encourage teachers to engage students in active reading strategies as they read each passage twice together. The strategies used during this process include the following: • Whisper-reading: Students read a passage, each reading at their own pace. If students finish reading the assigned section of the text before the teacher calls time, they are expected to return to the beginning of the given section and reread it. • Echo-reading: The teacher reads a phrase/sentence/paragraph/section of a text aloud, and students repeat what the teacher reads with the same expression. Students also take turns reading to a partner. The teacher provides corrective feedback to students as they read. • Choral-reading: The entire group (whole class or small group) reads a text aloud together simultaneously. Teachers provide corrective feedback as they listen to students read. In Wiley Blevins ’s Teaching Phonics, Short Read Decodables, and Read to Know Text Sets, after students read a passage, children answer evidence-based questions designed to address general understandings of the text, genre, vocabulary/words in context, text features, and text structure. More complex questions necessitating higher-order thinking are also provided. These include questions about characters, setting, conflict, plot, and theme in narrative texts as well as questions that address expository texts — such as those involving comparing and contrasting, problem and solution, sequence of events, cause and effect, author ’s purpose, and main idea.
Focus on Engagement with Reading
Within the program’s overarching framework, Ready4Reading aims to place significant emphasis on building students’ engagement with reading, and on making learning accessible, practical, and motivating. A bevy of research shows, quite clearly, a strong and obvious link between the amount and frequency of reading that students do with the rate in which they develop as readers (Cain & Oakhill, 2011; Duff, Tomblin, & Catts, 2015; Stanovich, 1986; 2000; Borman et al., 2007; Cunningham & Stanovich, 1998; Blevins, 2019). Research shows that by creating the
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