Reading Lesson Plans

It does not matter if you teach five year old children or kids that are sixteen, reading is still important. A good reader will use his or her skills not only in the language arts classroom, but for every other subject as well. It is extremely important to teach good reading skills from the very beginning. Here are a couple of creative approaches to making good reading lesson plans.

Practice, Practice, Practice:
One of the best ways to teach good reading habits is to encourage plenty of practice in your reading lesson plans. Good readers enjoy doing so and you will not have to encourage those students to read. However, there are plenty of students that do not want to take the time to open a book. That is when you need to come up with ways to get your kids to practice reading skills. It is often not enough to tell your students to read at home. You need a better way to entice them into reading for pleasure. One way to encourage practicing reading is to have a reading calendar. Give students a blank monthly calendar and tell him or her how many minutes you expect them to read each month. Leave the reading material up to them—as long as they are reading something, then it should count. At the end of the month, you can offer extra credit or some other type of reward for the minutes read each month.

Group Reading:
Group reading projects are also fun. These often work well for elementary age students. If you would like for your class to complete a long novel, then allow your students to read it out loud in groups. The groups will then be responsible for getting the novel completed. “Popcorn” reading is also fun for younger children. This is when you pass a book around the room and each child reads a page out loud. This encourages good reading skills and gets kids over shyness as well.