Ways to Encourage Your Students to READ during Distance Learning!
Whether or not your class is virtual, hybrid, or back in school, teachers are always searching for ways to encourage students to read. Reading is so crucial to academic success. Students “learn to read” in K-3 and “read to learn from 4th grade forward.”
Encourage Your Students to READ!
During part of my teaching years, in the area I lived in, there was a reading incentive program with our local Pizza Hut restaurant. Students would complete a log of reading minutes and then earn their own “personal pan pizza” as a reward for their reading. My own children loved earning their own pizza certificate.
As teachers, we should always have to goal of instilling a love of reading in our students. Because becoming a strong reader will help all of them, no matter where their future takes them. I wrote another article about “the love of reading.” You can read it here:
How Important is Reading Aloud to Your Class?
A List of Reading Strategies
Below I will provide a few ways for you to encourage your students to read no matter if you are teaching virtually or in person.
- send home reading logs
- provide lists of apps
- record yourself reading
- utilize challenges and contests
- provide parents with some tips and strategies
- assign book reports
- character dress-up events
- other creative ways
Send Home Reading Logs
Probably one of the most used strategies is to assign a reading log as part of their homework. Depending on the grade level, assign so many minutes of reading each night for homework (increasing as the grade level goes up). In my opinion I would top the time at 20 minutes. You will find that students who enjoy reading will probably go longer any way. But this helps the struggling reader complete the log without too much arguing with their parents.
Provide Lists of Apps
As more and more families transition to reading in the digital realm, you may want to provide a list of reading apps that have fun, yet engaging ideas for students to read at home.
Ask your team partners if they know of some apps or online sites for independent reading. Or do a bit of researching for your grade level on your own.
Record yourself reading
One strategy that is really good for your struggling readers is for you to record yourself reading a take home book that your students can use to follow along with you as you read.
You can model correct intonation and flow of reading aloud. You can let students know when you are moving to the next page so that they can follow along.
Check with your district to see if they have a software program that you can use to record yourself and that allows you to send or post the recordings for your students to access.
Utilize Challenges and Contests
All children (well, maybe most is more accurate) like challenges and contests. If you ask some local food places, you might be able to get a coupon for a meal that you can use as an incentive/reward for the contest.
You need to hype up the contest. Make it exciting!! Consider having stages where students earn an incentive to keep going. Often if there is only one grand prize, students zone out after they realize another classmate is far ahead of them. But if you have smaller rewards along the way for progress made, more students are likely to continue with the reading contest or challenge.
Provide parents with tips and strategies
It’s always a good idea to provide parents a “cheat sheet” of tips and strategies to use when they are trying to read with their child at home. Strategies that are common place to you are not so obvious to parents.
For example, remind parents of primary age students to encourage children to sound out words that are decodable, but to go ahead and tell them the ones that are not. Give them examples like; “cat, pen, top” are all decodable, but “the, are, enough” are not so you can tell them those words when they are stuck.
Speaking of tips, I want to offer you my FREE downloadable list of 101 Teacher Tips. Just fill in your email information, and I will zip it right over to you.
**
Assign Book Reports
I know this tip sounds pretty “old school” (as my kids like to say). But it is still a good way to get students engaged in the content of the book they have chosen to read.
Lots of other websites have various ideas for fun book report ideas, so I won’t repeat their efforts. I will give you a link to a website article that I found in the “We Are Teachers” site. You can access it here:
22 Creative Book Report Ideas for Every Grade and Subject
Character Dress-up Events
A super fun way to encourage students to love reading is to have a character dress up day. It’s even more fun if you do it with your whole grade level.
To lead up to this event, be sure to read some favorite stories aloud to your class. Give them ideas for simple costumes (and send the list home to parents). For example, Paul Bunyan, Winnie the Pooh, and Clifford (the dog). If you need help finding these books ask your school librarian. They know all the popular books at each grade level. And they can point you to a few that would be fairly easy to create costumes for.
Other Creative Ways
There are other creative ways to encourage students to read. You can assign a biography report to expose them to biographies. One school I was at had a grade level reading contest to see who could read the most pages in a month.
You can create a long chain (or caterpillar) that hangs up in the classroom. It would have a section for each book a student has read. The books read are all combined into this long “chain.” The students enjoy watching it get bigger and bigger throughout the year.
I bet if you put your thinking cap on you can think of a bunch of other creative ways to encourage your students to read.
Until Next Time,
