Are you constantly working on reading skills in your classroom? Do you have any emergent readers? An emergent reader is one who is interested in books but can’t yet read them independently or may be able to read some words but requires continued support to make meaning from print. It could also be a student who is not yet interested in reading books. An emergent reader may have not yet developed intentional or symbolic means of communication.
This is typically how the stages of reading development go:
- Awareness and Exploration Stage: Babies and Toddlers
- Early Learning Reading and Writing Stage: Kindergarten To First Grade
- Transitional Reading and Writing Stage: Second and Third Grade
- Competent Reading and Writing Stage: Fourth Grade and Beyond
Typically, emergent readers are at the early elementary level as you can see. However, these are only a guide and students of all ages can be emergent readers including students with disabilities, learning difficulties or English language learners. You can read more details about what emergent literacy is and what you need to know about it in this blog post.
Older Students at the Emergent Reader Level:
I actually work with older students who are still at the emergent reader level. My classroom is made-up of students with different cross-categorical disabilities who each have varying abilities. Most of my students are between the ages of 13-19. Since most emergent literacy activities are made with early elementary students in mind, it has been difficult to find materials and curriculum to use with my older students who are at the emergent reader level.
Here are the typical key skills that emergent readers are developing:
- Print Motivation
- Print Awareness
- Letter Knowledge
- Vocabulary
- Phonological Awareness
- Narrative Skills
I explain all of these skills in more details and ideas for working on each in this blog post- The 6 Emergent Literacy Skills That Your Child Needs to Know.
Resources and Ideas for Working with Older Students
Since I work with teenagers, I have to make sure that the resources and materials that I use to teach reading are age appropriate. Here are some materials and activities that have really helped me when working with my older students on early literacy skills:
Colour Topic Cards (FREE)
These are simple, yet effective. Building vocabulary skills and sight word skills is a huge part of emergent reading abilities. When students can start to recognize the colour words by sight, their fluency and overall confidence will improve.
Emergent Reader and Activities
These high interest, low level reading books and emergent reader activities are perfect for teaching reading in special education to older students. Finding engaging texts for older students who are emergent readers is not easy due to the lack of age appropriate and relevant emergent reader texts for older students. This resource makes planning and implementing reading intervention for emergent readers simple. The pictures are real images and age appropriate. There are books as well as file folder activities to practice vocabulary and sight words for each story. The file folders are great for engaging students in hands-on activities.
Raz-Kids
The website, Raz-Kids has been around for many years and if you aren’t using it in your special education classroom, you are definitely missing out! It has so many resources. This interactive website is full of levelled books that students can listen to on a SMARTboard, computer or tablet. If students are reading on a very low level, that’s okay- They can listen to the higher level books for exposure to new vocabulary, without having to sound out the words. This would make a great listening centre or independent work centre while you are teaching reading groups in your classroom.
Access to this website is not free but most schools are willing to purchase it for teachers or you could use your budget money to purchase. The best part is that you can have access for up to around 30 student accounts so multiple teachers in your building can share one account to save money if needed. You can create student logins and passwords and monitor specific student data with this site as well. You can also assign books and activities to students based on their reading levels. When reading some higher level books, there are comprehension quizzes for students to take after each story. The site will give you a report on which skills the student is struggling with such as main idea, vocabulary, retelling, etc. The other great aspect of this site is that you can print paper copies of the stories if you want to use them with your reading groups. There are 3-4 worksheets to go with each story, as well as an overall comprehension quiz for each story. Printing the stories makes it easy for students to hi-light vocabulary words and take them home for practice.
Epic
This website is free for educators to create an account (we love free, don’t we?!) You can create a class list and a password for each student to login independently similar to Raz Kids. You can also assign books to students and there is a wide range and variety of the types of books that you will see on Epic. There are many different series of books on this site, as well as a nice variety of fiction vs nonfiction. Most stories have a short comprehension quiz after them as well and all stories can be read aloud.
I hope you found some materials and activities that you can use for helping teach older students who are at an emergent reader level. What are your favourite websites and activities to use for teaching emergent literacy skills?
Happy Teaching!
-Jessica