How to Build a Reading Program

• Know About Where to Start
• How To
• Assessment
• Intervention
• Practice and Intervention

Know about where to start?

If you're new to High Noon Books or even to teaching reading, here is a simple guide to help you build a reading course from the ground up. First, you will need a guide to teaching reading, like the Teaching Reading Sourcebook. New teachers will find it useful for its sample lessons, practical demonstrations, and clear explanations of effective means of teaching specific reading skills, as well as an overview of how all of those skills fit together into a reading curriculum. Experienced teachers will appreciate the up-to-date research basis and the chance to refine and expand their skills and knowledge. Jump to How-To.

Teachers need to use assessment to gauge the effectiveness of their methods, and nip in the bud any difficulties their students may be experiencing. Missing a step in a reading curriculum can drag a student’s performance, and attitude, down. But there is no one reading assessment that effectively and fairly measures reading skills. Therefore, the developers of the Sourcebook have also collected the best reading assessments available and grouped them together with extensive explanations on how and why to apply them and how to interpret and respond to the results. Jump to Assessment.

Whatever a student’s needs, there are a variety of responses, or intervention programs, to help struggling readers. High Noon Books publishes reproducible, paper-based, and easy to use intervention materials developed in line with the Report of the Year 2000 National Reading Panel – the basis of Reading First instruction. Below, we recommend a comprehensive course in pre-emergent to emergent reading skills. If this product does not fit your student’s needs, there are a few recommendations at the end of the intervention section, below. Jump to Intervention.

For practice, reinforcement, development of good reading habits, and just plain fun, students learning to read need good books. High Noon Books started over a quarter century ago to provide just that resource for struggling, older readers: chapter books, of connected text – that is, what students will have to read later in school and in the workplace – that appeal to their interests, and have an acceptable appearance, so that they will be appropriately challenged, entertained, and not embarassed by their books. High Noon Books has over 300 titles in publication, from phonics-based chapter books through fourth-grade readability adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. We hope you, and your students, enjoy them!
Jump to Practice and Reinforcement,

How-To

Full of practical information, lessons and teaching ideas, and based on the latest research in reading instruction, the Teaching Reading Sourcebook is both a guide and a resource to educators teaching basic reading skills to students of all ages, including ESL/ELL students, learning disabled students, and undiagnosed struggling readers.

The Second Edition Sourcebook, published in 2008, shows teachers how to develop literacy from the initial stages of letter recognition and phonemic awareness through fluency. If your student is reading below a fourth grade level, and especially if the student is struggling with any of the skills it takes to read, this book has clearly-presented, accurate and cutting-edge information, instructions, and examples to help you help that student.

Assessment

Measure student needs and progress with the tests selected for the Second Edition Assessing Reading: Multiple Measures.

A critical part of any organized attempt at improving reading is assessment. No single test manages to take in the full range of skills and situations, so the developers of the Teaching Reading Sourcebook have scoured the available reading tests once again for the best and widest variety of meaningful, research-based assessments available, including many for bilingual-Spanish students.

Intervention

For struggling readers in elementary through middle school, High Noon Reading Intervention is a lifeline. Using it, teachers and parents have helped students master phonics decoding skills, improve spelling and fluency, and increase their vocabulary and comprehension.

Each lesson has the same structure, in order to make the content the focus of learning. See sample pages here.

Practice and Reinforcement

As a reward for their hard work, and to reinforce their new skills, struggling readers should practice reading carefully leveled chapter books of connected text (i.e. not picture books or graphic novels).

The Sound Out series of closely-leveled, phonics-based chapter books appeal to students aged 7-adult who are still learning to decode fluently. There are 36 fiction and 18 nonfiction titles in six difficulty levels.