• Balanced Literacy

    What Is Guided Reading — and Why Isn’t It Working for Every Student?

    A teacher leads four students through "The Butterfly Journey" during a guided reading group at a small table.

    Guided reading is a small-group approach where a teacher works with four to six students at a similar level, using leveled texts and prompting them to problem-solve words through context, meaning, and first-letter cues. It matters because that prompting trains students in the strategies reading science links to struggling readers, not skilled ones, so a child can look successful in the group while missing the decoding skills the assessment never checks.

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  • Balanced Literacy

    Balanced Literacy: What It Is, Where It Came From, and What the Research Actually Says

    A boy reads aloud from "The Snowy Day" while a teacher records his progress on a running record during guided reading.

    Balanced literacy is an approach to reading instruction that combines several classroom practices (guided reading, shared reading, read-alouds, interactive writing, independent reading, and some word study) into a daily literacy block. It was designed to give students multiple entry points into reading through a balance of teacher-led and student-directed experiences, and it became the dominant approach in American elementary schools beginning in the late 1990s.

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  • Science of Reading

    How to Teach Orthographic Mapping: A Sequence That Sticks

    A teacher's hand guides a student's finger across letter tiles spelling S-A-T and P-I-N on a wooden desk.

    Teaching orthographic mapping means sequencing and pacing instruction so that students bond sounds to spellings, one reliable correspondence at a time, until each word type becomes automatic. It matters because mapping isn’t something you deliver in a lesson. It’s something a student builds across many successful encounters, which makes your job less “cover the skill” and more “sequence the conditions for it to form.”

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  • Science of Reading

    Orthographic Mapping Activities: A 10-Minute Routine

    A teacher holds up a sound box card reading /f/ /i/ /sh/ as students practice an orthographic mapping activity.

    Orthographic mapping activities are short, sound-first routines that help students bond a word’s sounds to its spelling so the word is stored for instant recognition. They matter because this bonding, not repetition, is what moves a word from effortful decoding into automatic sight, which is the difference between a reader who sounds out “the” every time and one who just reads it.

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  • Science of Reading

    How to Teach Reading Comprehension So the Thinking Transfers

    A teacher leans over a small table, guiding four young readers through a discussion of their picture books.

    Teaching reading comprehension means making your own invisible thinking visible to students, then gradually transferring that thinking to them through modeling and guided practice until they can do it independently. It matters because comprehension can’t be assigned and checked like a worksheet: a student can finish every graphic organizer and still read passively, the way Jasmine did, because nobody ever showed her what the thinking sounds like.

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  • Science of Reading

    What Is Reading Comprehension? A Clear Definition for Teachers

    A teacher and young student discuss an open picture book together at a classroom table.

    Reading comprehension is the process of constructing meaning from written text. It is not simply recognizing the words on the page; it is building an understanding of what those words add up to by connecting them to what you already know. Comprehension is the goal of reading itself, which means a student who decodes accurately but cannot make meaning has not finished reading at all. She has finished half of it.

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