Creating a Supportive Environment

Highly effective reading teachers create a supportive environment for children to prosper in. Children are encouraged to develop into good readers when they are provided with a supportive environment. Encouraging students to become engaged in reading is an important step in literacy.

Factors that actively involve children in reading:

Positive Attitude: Some children love to read, some children can’t read and some children have never been given the opportunity to read. Attitude or desire is everything and teaching children at an early age will give them the opportunity to fall in love with reading. By having a positive attitude, children feel better and are more inclined to involve themselves with reading.

Engagement: A child who is engaged in reading employs both his mind and his heart and is well on his way to becoming a lifelong reader. Developing lifelong readers should be the goal of every teacher, and, therefore, providing an instructional environment that promotes reading engagement should be at the top of the priority list. The engaged reader is capable of overcoming obstacles such as low parental education and income as well as preferences and abilities associated with gender.

Motivation: Motivation is a critical part of engagement. As motivation increases, students want to spend more time reading. There are 5 main factors that motivate students to read, they are:

1.    Self-selection of books

2.    Access to a variety of fiction and nonfiction books

3.    Books that are personally interesting

4.    Access to lots of books

5.    Being read to by teachers and family members and when peers shared what they were reading with them

Range of Genre: For all children to become good readers, teachers must accommodate their students’ different interests and reading abilities by using a range of authentic texts, such as picture books, easy readers, chapter books, informational books, poetry, magazines, newspapers, and biographies.

Time for Reading: Ample time for reading is defined as: “more time to read than the combined total allocated for learning about reading and talking or writing about what has been read.” Teachers need to ensure that they allow ample amounts of time for children to read every day.