Reading

What does Balanced Literacy look like at Elmwood?

• Interactive Read Alouds/Shared Reading
• Word Study
• Guided Reading
  • independent reading
• Responding to Reading
  • Independent Writing
• Writers Workshop

Why are we focusing on Balanced Literacy?

Using a balanced literacy approach allows us to expose students to several literacy components that all work together to teach reading in a meaningful way. Research in best practices for teaching literacy suggest that students need to have a balance between explicit reading skill instruction and modeling and independent exploration, inquiry, and practice. Overall, the goal of balanced literacy is to create independent readers by inspiring an authentic love and appreciation for reading among students. It is important to foster accuracy,fluency and comprehension, as well as characteristics like:

• Perseverance
• Collaboration
• focus and stamina
• Higher order thinking

Our Balanced Literacy approach provides students with all of these components in a structure that better allows for students to make connections and apply these skills throughout their literacy block.