MAT Blog

Five New Year's Resolutions you can Keep...for Literacy.

Winter vacation is a great time for teachers to rest, refresh, and renew in preparation for the start of school in the New Year. The beginning of a new year, or new term, is the perfect time to make resolutions for literacy instruction in your classroom.  Just a few small “tweaks” to your literacy strategiescan help you feel instructionally renewed and refreshed!  Here are a few resolutions you should consider keeping…for the benefit of your students:

1. Carve out time. Find time in your day for children to spend more time reading at their own level.  It could simply be a small chunk of time (10 minutes is fine) before or after a transition that students could spend reading text at their independent level.  This time will encourage their independent use of literacy strategies and help to build confidence as readers.

2. Make the connection. Take a look at your content topics (social studies, science, health) for the remainder of the year and find ways to integrate your literacy strategies.  There are so many high quality non-fiction texts available— on a variety of topics— that you are sure to find the perfect match for topic/reading ability of your students.  You may also find ways to further integrate the students' writing into your content instruction.  A science unit could be a great platform for a writing genre study on research reports.

3. Take a second look at your data.  All of your assessments provide you with powerful data about your teaching and the students' learning.  It can be beneficial to return to the assessment data to discover areas of learning opportunity for students. Disaggregating the data based on different criteria can provide you with a completely different glimpse into student learning.  For example, your DIBELS™ data may show that few of your students advanced out of the "At Risk" category for words read per minute.  However, a further examination may show that even though few advanced to "Low Risk," a group of students showed significant improvement.  An even closer look could lead you to identify that the students that did make progress were each part of a targeted intervention.  Having a second look at the data can lead you to different instructional priorities in the New Year.

4. Reflect real life.  The world just beyond your classroom door is teeming with opportunities to connect to your literacy instruction.  What ways can you make the students' learning more authentic?  Perhaps having students compose poems or pieces of prose for a writing competition will show them a larger audience outside of the classroom.  Check out a couple of good resources:  The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards for teens, and The Young Voices Foundation for all ages of students.

5. Infuse the classroom with experts.  Are there others in the school or the local community that could add something different to your classroom; an area of expertise, a unique travel experience, or a different perspective on your community? Bringing in others to act as "experts" in an area of study is powerful to learners. You can connect these experiences to the students' literacy through integrated reading and writing activities that ask students to infuse their new learning with literacy strategies. 

For even more ways to capitalize on the reading and writing connection, download our K-6 Best Practices Guide for Reading Comprehension. Happy New Year!