What happens during Reading Recovery Lessons?
Each lesson consists of:
- re-reading familiar stories,
- reading a story that was read for the first time the day before,
- working with letters and words using magnetic letters,
- writing a story
- assembling a cut-up story and
- reading a new book
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The teacher teaches, demonstrates problem solving strategies, and provides just enough support to help to help the child develop effective reading and writing strategies and work as independent as possible.
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Each Reading Recovery lesson incorporates the five components identified by the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act as essential in a comprehensive instructional program in reading. The five components are:
- phonemic awareness,
- phonics instruction,
- fluency instruction,
- vocabulary instruction, and
- text comprehension.
- Accelerated learning is possible because Reading Recovery teachers base their instruction on carefully documented daily observations of what each child already knows about reading and writing. This is an efficient approach that allows all future instruction to work from the child’s strengths.
- There are two possible outcomes after a full series of Reading Recovery lessons, both positive:
- 1.the child makes accelerated progress and continues to progress thereafter with classroom instruction. (Nationally 8 of 10 children successfully complete lessons.)
- 2. Additional evaluation is recommended and further action is initiated to help the child continue making progress. This is a positive outcome, because Reading Recovery’s diagnostic teaching helps identify children who need more help and provides a documented record of the child’s knowledge and strengths as a base for future teaching.