Love of Reading Increases Academic Success for NHA Students

Good readers are good learners, but a love of reading doesn’t guarantee straight A’s. Certain foundational skills must be in place for students to truly succeed.

Kim Gray, an English language arts (ELA) Curriculum Team Leader for National Heritage Academies (NHA), said students who love to read put themselves in a great position to learn.

“Starting out by loving books and loving language does have a profound impact on a student's success academically,” Gray said. “They have a larger vocabulary, and they have more background knowledge because they do more reading, but students also need to be introduced to higher academic vocabulary. They need to be taught to decode words, which is to recognize words they’ve seen before, and sound out words they haven’t.”

It's important to catch issues related to reading early in their educational journey, Gray said. The sooner issues can be corrected, the quicker students will find that love of reading. She added that students who don’t have the foundational skills stray from reading early and stay away from it with the aid of technology.

“Our society is becoming much more accessible to students who struggle with reading difficulties because we have a lot more things available auditorily. We have dictation apps that can write it for you. They have scanners that will read for you, so reading difficulties are becoming less constricting as technology advances.”

While helpful to those in need, those tools put more pressure on teachers to diagnose issues as early as possible. Summerfield Charter Academy Kindergarten Teacher Paz Noel uses a technique that serves two purposes: getting to know her students better and quickly determine their reading skillset. A lot of reading difficulties can be prevented with early intervention.

“In the beginning it's about getting to know those kids and figuring out what their passions are,” Noel said. “Then I can relate with them. I want that connection of who's got basketball or soccer games, what’s everyone’s good news, what did you do for dinner? It’s making that connection.”

The next step involves showing the students that reading crosses over into all subjects, not just reading and writing. Noel shared a moment from her class where students went outside to learn about the sense of sight.

“I told them we were going back inside to write in our journals about what we noticed outside with our magnifying glasses, and they're like, ‘but it's not reading time, it's not handwriting time.’ I explained that what they were doing all loops back in a big circle. I want to teach them that it's both. It's not just, ‘hey, it's reading time’ or ‘we're only doing numbers.’ No, it's everything, and that's hard at this age.”

The next challenge for teachers is helping students develop reading stamina. Students who can sit and pay attention to a book for minutes at a time are better equipped to sit through a 20-question math test and give the same energy to the final five questions as they did for the first five.

Olivia Vaden, a third-grade teacher at Summerfield Charter Academy, believes stamina also bolsters self-confidence in students.

“Not only does it increase their focus and concentration, I think it has a lot to do with sparking their curiosity and pushing themselves to grow academically,” she said. “That's the cool thing about seeing how reading comprehension fosters learning in other areas of academics and at home too.”

As students mature, their stamina increases, and other subjects are affected in positive ways.

“I can see that transfer, from the classroom activities that we're doing to other assignments: math tests, social studies, all the curriculum that we have. What they're able to do in the beginning of the year as far as their attention, focus, and concentration as opposed to the end of the year, it comes from building the skills early on. We just need to start by meeting the students where they are.”