Reading Recovery


Image - reading recovery logo


WHAT IS READING RECOVERY

Reading Recovery is a highly effective short-term intervention of one-to-one tutoring for low-achieving first graders. The goal is to enable these initially at-risk students to make accelerated progress and to become increasingly competent, independent readers and writers during approximately 12 to 20 weeks of daily, individual, 30 minute lessons.

WHY READING RECOVERY
Good readers and writers develop early. Retention and remediation, accompanying several years of failure, do not enable children to catch up with peers so that they can function productively in school or later on in society. The longer a child fails, the harder remediation becomes. Using early intervention, before failure is established, can reduce problems later in school. Initially low-achieving children can, with special instruction, make accelerated progress. The more children successfully read and write the more independent they become. Early intervention facilitates and expedites this process.

WHICH STUDENTS BENEFIT
Reading Recovery children are selected from the lowest 20 percent of their first grade classroom in reading and writing achievement, based on the results of the Observation Survey and teacher recommendation. 

HOW DOES IT WORK
Reading Recovery is based on the assumption that intensive, high-quality help during the early years of schooling is the most productive investment of resources. The early years, which set the stage for later learning, are particularly critical for children who are at risk of failure.

The program provides an intensive, individually sequenced tutorial designed to build on the child’s observed strengths. By untangling the confusion early on, at-risk children have the opportunity to read and write with confidence.

Each Reading Recovery lesson includes reading familiar books, reading yesterday’s new book and taking a running record, working with letters and/or words using magnetic letters, writing a story, assembling a cut-up story, and reading a new book.

BENEFITS
Students who complete the Reading Recovery program are independent learners who continue to learn with supportive classroom instruction, usually without the need for future remediation.
  • Reading Recovery reduces the number of students retained in first grade, and those needing special education and long term-remedial help.
  • Reading Recovery trains teachers to be careful observers of children’s reading behavior and to be professional decision makers in the teaching and learning of students.
  • Reading Recovery enables students to read increasingly more difficult texts at an instructional level, expanding their power to learn from their own efforts and solve problems as they read and write.
  • Reading Recovery teaches students to compose increasingly complex messages using resources to solve new words: students monitor and edit their work, knowing when and how to get help.


Questions?
Contact Kelley Engblom, Reading Recovery Coordinator, at 248-573-8111.