Elementary Reading Lesson Plans: Tips for Teaching Elementary Reading

Helping Your Elementary Class Read

Reading Comprehension

Comprehension is essential to every child's ability to read. In order to teach reading comprehension, have your students read short texts and have a class discussion. Ask your class questions that require them to analyze the text and form opinions. For example, you can ask your class what may happen next in a story, based upon what's happened so far.

Teaching your students to use context clues will likely improve their comprehension. Context clues are the words that surround an unknown word and provide information about it. Go over a passage on the board that contains a vocabulary word and context clues. Cover up the new word and have your students figure out what word may be there based on the clues. It's likely that the word your class comes up with is a synonym for the new word.

Reading Fluency

Fluency is a measure of how smoothly a child's able to read passages. Have different children read the same passage aloud more than once. Record each child in small groups and play it back so that he or she can hear the improvement.

A common method you can use to improve fluency is teaching your students sight words. Sight words are common words like 'the' or 'and' that children can memorize. The more sight words a child knows, the faster he or she will typically be able to read. Create a list of sight words for your students and use them for classroom games, such as hangman.

Teaching Your Class Blends

Sound blends occur in words when two sounds are combined. For example, in the word 'blend', 'b' and 'l' make separate sounds but blend together in the word. Although kids who have a good grasp of phonics often can sound out blends without direct instruction, some kids have trouble putting sounds together. You can teach your class with the following two elementary reading lesson plans for teaching blends.

Choose a letter that blends with many different letters, such as 's'. Write 's' on the board and let your students experiment with different blends. They might come up with different combinations, including 'sl', 'sp', 'sk' and 'st'. For each, help your class make a list of words that use that blend.

You can also teach your students blends by writing words on note cards. Sort the cards as a class by the types of blends your students find. Then, have your students read all of the cards. Alternatively, you can put certain blends on some cards and vowels on others. Your students can then use multiple cards to create words.

Reading for Fun

The more your students read, the more they will likely improve. Create an atmosphere in the classroom where reading is encouraged. Review age and level-appropriate book lists with your students, and allow them to choose books and other reading materials for the classroom bookshelves. Create a daily reading time in the classroom in which you sit and read these texts with your students.