Primary Reading Lessons: Plans for Teaching Primary Reading

Teaching Reading to Your Primary School Class

Sparking Interest in Reading

In order to successfully improve the reading skills of your primary school students, it can help to get them motivated. Create a positive learning environment in your classroom. Maintain a sense of respect between all individuals and make sure that each student gets an equal say. Stay tuned in to the interests and lives of your students so that you can present reading materials in a relevant, relatable way.

It can be a useful to stock your classroom not only with required reading, but also with books that your class expresses interest in. Present your class with book lists on monthly or bi-monthly basis and allow them to vote on what the new books will be. Have quiet reading time where your students are allowed to read these books for fun, with no pressure involved.

Primary Reading Lessons that Increase Fluency

During primary grades, it can be integral devote a lot of instructional time to reading fluency. Kids need strong reading fluency in order to read texts quickly and without too many starts and stops. You can use phonics instruction to increase fluency because children with strong phonics skills can often sound out almost any word.

Teach your students a couple different sound combinations through direct instruction. Have them practice the sound combinations by sorting words. Write out at least five words for each sound combination on sets of note cards. Scramble up the cards and challenge your students to sort them by sound. Then, have them read all of the words aloud.

Select books that focus on certain sounds. Make photocopies of the books and let students search for all of the words that use a particular sound. Anytime they find a word, they can highlight it.

Divide students into groups. Assign each group a sound or letter combination and challenge them to come up with as many words as possible that use that sound. Ask them to list all of the words on a piece of paper. Allow your students to use a dictionary if they're struggling with spellings. Post the papers around the room for your class to refer to when they're unsure of a word's pronunciation.

Helping Students with Reading Comprehension

Before you start reading a text to the class or have them read it themselves, do some pre-reading activities. For example, before starting a book, have a class discussion about what your students think the narrative will be about. Have your students look over the table of contents and discuss the way in which the book's presented and what that could mean about it. Skim a bit of the text as a class to prepare for more in-depth reading.

As you read a text, have discussions. The more your class is able to formulate their own opinions and ideas, the more they are reading critically. Ask your class to analyze character motivations and try to predict what will happen next in a story. As your class reads, ask them to highlight new vocabulary words they may not know. Make a class list of these terms and hang it on the wall.