Reading is at the heart of learning and thriving. It sparks imagination, strengthens concentration, builds vocabulary, and fosters creativity and critical thinking. Reading broadens the mind, nurtures the brain, and opens doors to discovery and lifelong opportunity. To help all students become confident, capable readers, educators must be vigilant in identifying and supporting students who need extra guidance and support.
Drawing on over three decades of experience in literacy education, Sheila Clark-Edmands, author of the Orton-Gillingham-based SPIRE reading intervention, identified ten essential components to create highly successful readers.
From Ms. Clark-Edmands’ research and experience, we have distilled five high-impact actions teachers can take to support healthy literacy development in all students, including striving readers who require evidence-based intervention to find reading success.
The earlier you identify students at risk for reading challenges, the easier it is to intervene swiftly and efficiently. By screening students starting in kindergarten, you can take action to prevent reading struggles and ensure all students are on track. Even if challenges are identified later, diagnostic assessments can pinpoint needs, allowing for targeted intervention.
Implement a universal screener at the start of a new school year to catch students at risk for reading difficulties, including dyslexia. Early identification ensures that you can bring special attention to students in need. Keep in mind that all developing readers, particularly those at risk for dyslexia, benefit from explicit, systematic, multisensory instruction that follows the structured literacy approach. For older students, use diagnostic assessments to uncover strengths and challenge areas needing intervention.
Phonemic awareness—the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds (phonemes) within words—strongly correlates with reading success. By incorporating playful yet purposeful daily activities that develop students’ capacity to hear and manipulate the phonemes in words, you can help your students in PreK and higher start laying a strong reading foundation.
For emerging readers, start with simple phonological awareness activities like clapping out syllables or playing rhyming games. As students progress, introduce more challenging tasks such as stretching out words to hear and then isolate beginning, middle, and ending sounds. When students are ready, or if working with older striving readers, practice manipulating sounds by deleting or substituting phonemes (e.g., “fan” becomes “fun” and then becomes “sun”).
Reading and writing are interconnected processes that reinforce each other. Therefore, explicit instruction in both decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling) helps students map sounds to letters, enabling them to store words and word parts in memory. This leads to automatic word recognition—a key to fluency—and accurate spelling.
As you introduce a phonics concept (e.g., the sound made by “sh”), students should immediately apply it by reading words (like “ship” or “shin”) and then spelling them out. Use spiral review to reinforce a new concept while integrating it with concepts previously taught. Extend the learning with connected text and sentence dictation activities to help students solidify their newly acquired skills. Remember that word work often presents an opportunity to reinforce grade-appropriate vocabulary.
Evidence-based structured literacy approaches like Orton-Gillingham stress the importance of teaching phonics skills in a clear, systematic way. Begin with simple sound-letter correspondences and progress to increasingly complex concepts, ensuring students master foundational skills before moving forward.
Start with simple CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words, introducing single-consonant and vowel sounds. Once students master basic decoding, move on to phonetic concepts like digraphs (e.g., “sh” and “th”) and continue increasing complexity based on students’ mastery. Many structured literacy programs provide a clear scope and sequence for teachers to follow, ensuring a learner-centered, developmentally appropriate progression.
Decodable texts allow students to practice phonics skills within connected text, reinforcing both fluency and comprehension. Align decodable texts with your instruction to ensure students are practicing skills they have already been taught, making the reading both accessible and meaningful.
Maintain a library of decodable readers that align with your phonics instruction. After introducing a new phonics or decoding concept, consider modeling fluent reading of the decodable text, then guiding the whole class in reading aloud together. Follow up with independent practice, small group work, or literacy-building stations to reinforce the range of skills you have taught in your lessons.
Orton-Gillingham-based SPIRE® provides educators with systematic explicit, multisensory intervention that supports beginning and striving readers, including students with dyslexia, on the journey to becoming successful readers. The science of reading-aligned program includes a FREE Placement Test to evaluate and place students in appropriate levels of the program. SPIRE builds phonological awareness, phonics, spelling, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension with systematic 10-step teacher-led lessons, and is supported by engaging collections of SPIRE Decodable Readers. Learn more about SPIRE’s comprehensive, easy-to-use and implement program on our website.