It’s always flattering. But there’s a problem.

Writing a book review takes time and… can I be honest here? It can also be a little boring and a lot mundane.

But that was definitely not the case with Sarah Collinge’s book, Raising the Standards Through Chapter Books: The C.I.A. Approach. From the book’s first Introduction through the hands-on C.I.A. worksheets, I was hooked.

Collinge’s words will resonate with many primary, secondary, and even, post-secondary teachers. She writes, “[Students] are reading with the misconception that, at some point, the books will magically make sense to them. The question becomes this: How do I help students to develop the stamina to read longer texts?... It is about the many students in [the] classroom who, despite their interest, are unable to finish longer texts.”

I know that you are already to the question at the finish line. Are students really prepared to read more complex passages at the college level?  I think you know the answer to that question as well as I do.

Advocating an honest-to-goodness fix for troubled readers, Ms. Collinge’s reminds us that, “While intervention is important, it alone will not solve the problem. Students need to be able to read complex texts proficiently for success in high school, college and the workplace. Reading these complex texts requires higher skill levels and stamina.”

It is interesting to note that with the accelerating demands that colleges, careers, and everyday life places on the general population, “the text used with students K-12 have decreased in complexity over the last half century.”

That could explain why we’ve seen so many professional development articles, books, and blogs devoted to advancing reading comprehension. In my opinion, the problem lies in the fact that most of this information is simply an outline of "what to do" but they do not give the details of the actual “how to do it”- Collinge’s book changes all that. She shares interesting insights and tips like:
•    How-to Prioritize Tight Schedules
•    Instructional Read-aloud Frameworks
•    Involving Strong Readers and Struggling Readers in the Same Activities
•    Using Layered Strategies
•    How-to Make Complex Text More Comfortable and Predictable

Raising the Standards Through Chapter Books: The C.I.A. Approach is not about redefining reading skills or strategies across grade levels. Instead this book offers sound ideas that can help every teacher apply known strategies and skills in progressively more demanding texts. It’s fun for the teacher and students. It’s genius!

I highly recommend this book. For those students who are missing the building blocks essential to learning to read, I encourage you to check out how Temple University and others addressed this literacy problem >

As a marketer, this video was one of the most interesting videos I’ve ever seen. It gets right to the core of why people buy what they buy. It gets right to the core of their human nature. It caused an instant mass of marketing ideas to flood my mind:


But as I kept watching this video, instead of simply spurring marketing ideas, it caused me to ask: Why do I do what I do? Why am I working for a small company that promotes literacy? Why have I been doing this for almost three years now?

Well… here is my truest, deepest, unfiltered reasons as to why I work for Reading Horizons:

I started working for Reading Horizons because I was desperate. I was fresh out of college with no experience and I got one single job offer: here. I was in no position to turn it down. Because the company is small and still growing, I took the small hourly wage they offered me and told myself I would take it as a learning experience and look for a new job a year later. I also told myself it would be my service project to the world since literacy is undoubtedly a good cause. A service project I would work on for a year. Service is good, right? That was three years ago.

So why am I still here? Why am I still working for Reading Horizons? With the skills I have gained I could easily find another job and make a lot more money. So, although I do need to make some money and my employment helps in that regard, the money is not the reason I work here – I could make more working somewhere else.

My next thought was because it’s our purpose. I love working for a good purpose. I value learning and I love knowing that what I do is helping others gain what I believe is the chief skill needed for continual learning. But in actuality, there are other companys that work for the very same purpose. There are other companys that produce curriculum for struggling readers. We’re not the sole providers of reading curriculum. If it was a love for literacy that provided the true core as to why I do what I do… I would probably get my teacher certification and start teaching reading. That’s not my chief desire. It’s not literacy in of itself that keeps me working for Reading Horizons. I love working for a good purpose but I could do that elsewhere…

But I think I know what it is. I think I know the reason I can’t leave Reading Horizons… but, in order for you to really get it, some background information is needed. When I was in high school I felt like I was living a joke. I felt like my teachers were doing the bare minimum to keep their jobs. It was a shrine to mediocrity. I felt like I rarely learned anything and that high school was holding me back in my progression as a human being. I knew I had to finish and had to get my diploma, but I actually didn’t even go to my graduation because I didn’t even value the “achievement” of graduating from high school. It didn’t even feel like an achievement. It was too easy. It was too full of pointless information. It was too big of a joke.

I remember feeling embarrassed walking down the halls of my school at the beginning of each day because I was embarrassed that high school was even a part of my life. I would get to school as close to the tardy bell as possible as to minimize my exposure to the institution. Because I got there as late as I could without simultaneously getting a tardy, I was always one of few people walking down the halls at that moment each day. I would hear the laughter coming from the classrooms and I would hear people going along with the joke that was our education and as I walked down that hall each day I remember being shocked that we were all going along with it. We were all playing this stupid game… and I wasn’t even referring to high school drama and pettiness, I was referring to the actual education. If it hadn’t been for my AP classes, I probably would’ve had to become a high school dropout just to avoid the stupidity of what was going on. After experiencing another mindless day in the life of a high school student I was writing in my journal… I was listing all of the things that I wanted to do with my life and one thing wrote down was that I wanted to reform education. I apparently thought it was as simple as writing it down.

Fast forward past the 3 years I spent in college and my first four months working for Reading Horizons. Although I’d thought I would stick it out for a year, I was miserable. My starting tasks included coding vocabulary words onto our website for four hours a day, followed by four hours of looking for people that I thought might be willing to link to our site and then asking them to do so. I hated it. I knew we had a great cause, but I didn’t know if I could stick it out for even the year I had originally committed myself to. I had grown up with teachers and advisors freaking out over my potential every second and there I was with a college degree, doing mind numbingly boring tasks that anyone could do - all day everyday. I hated it. Not only was it boring, but it wasn’t working. Emailing people and asking them to link to our site… not an effective movement. Trendy... yes. Effective… no. So ineffective that I finally had it one day and started ranting in one of our meetings that for four months I had done nothing but contact people to link to our site and for four months of effort there had been ten people that had linked to our site, I could hardly see my work as being valuable.

The next day we had a huge shipment that had to go out and our Company President, Tyson Smith, after hearing my rant about the lack of effectiveness of all of the things I was doing, decided to recruit me to help with the shipment. So there I was, a college graduate, working in a warehouse because that was the most value I could offer my company. It was the most terrible feeling I’d ever had. Shrink wrapping materials? That was where all of my potential had brought me? That was the only thing of value I could do for my place of employment… menial work that high school boys did? A great high school job, yes, a great career, no. But that day changed something for me.

As I copied, packaged, and shrink wrapped materials for eight hours… I held Reading Horizons curriculum in my hands. As I saw everything our program covered and how perfectly it covered that material, all of my memories of my best friend mocking me (with love of course) as a child for saying “library” as “liberry” and “Wendy’s” as “Windy’s” and “breakfast” as “breakfrest” … I remember thinking, if I had learned this way, I probably would’ve pronounced those words correctly. I would’ve understood the components of the English language in a near perfect manner. Not only did I gain respect for our method, but I instantly became jealous of all of the students that got to learn in such a perfect and thorough manner. I placed a bet in my mind that the students that learned with our method probably didn’t have best friends that were mocking their speech. Because they were being thoroughly taught how to blend letters and sound out each word. And at that moment Reading Horizons was no longer just a do-good company that promoted literacy. At that moment Reading Horizons became the best literacy curriculum available on this planet. I wasn’t just working in a warehouse shrink wrapping materials… I was shrink wrapping materials for the company that was the best of the best at teaching the most important skill a person ever learns. I was working for the company with the best method for teaching reading.

The small company I worked for wasn’t going to be a small company forever… because we were producing materials that were the most effective at teaching a skill every single person on this planet needs to learn. I was no longer jealous of my friends that had fancy jobs at Goldman Sachs… because I was somewhere that I could truly change the world. My claim as a high school student that I was going to reform education became instantly possible… almost too easily.

I work for Reading Horizons because Reading Horizons is the best way to teach any student, no matter their ability and regardless of learning disabilities, how to read. Anytime my mom tells me (with love of course) to look for a new job that will pay me more, I can’t consider it for long because I know I couldn’t find what Reading Horizons has anywhere else. I don’t think I could end up at another company that is truly the best of all of their competition at doing what they do. There is not a better methodology for teaching students to read English available. And I like working for the best.

"For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance:  but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath" Matthew 25:29.  Researchers speak of this syndrome as the "Matthew Effect"—which is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

First coined in 1983, by Walberg and Tsai, the "Matthew Effect" states that without intervention, students who start out with some literacy advantages tend to thrive and grow academically, while their less fortunate peers tend to get left behind. 

This is what respected author and psychologist, Margaret J. Kay, Ed.D. had to say about the matter:

“The past five years have brought major breakthroughs in our knowledge of how children learn to read and why so many fail. These new insights have been translated into techniques for teaching reading to beginning readers, including the many students who would otherwise encounter difficulties in mastering this fundamental skill.

Students who do not ‘learn to read’ during the first three years of school experience enormous difficulty when they are subsequently asked to ‘read to learn.’ Teaching students to read by the end of third grade is the single most important task assigned to elementary schools. During the first three years of schooling, students ‘learn to read.’

That is, they develop the capacity to interpret the written symbols for the oral language that they have been hearing since birth. Starting in fourth grade, schooling takes on a very different purpose, one that in many ways is more complex and demanding of higher-order thinking skills. If efficient reading skills are not developed by this time, the English language, history, mathematics, current events, and the rich tapestries of literature and science become inaccessible.

More students fail to learn to read by the end of the third grade than many people imagine. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that all schools encounter students who fall into this category and that all schools should have plans for addressing the special needs of these students.

In its 1994 Reading Assessment, the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), a federally supported program that tracks the performance of American students in core academic subjects, reported that more than four out of 10 fourth-graders (42 percent) in American schools were reading at a ‘below basic’ level. This means that they could not understand ‘uncomplicated narratives and high-interest informative texts.’

NAEP also reported that such illiteracy persists in the higher grades. The report found that nearly one-third (31 percent) of eighth-graders and nearly one-third (30 percent) of twelfth-graders are also reading at a ‘below basic’ level. The latter figures probably understate the problem, because many poor readers drop out of school before twelfth grade.

In contrast to popular belief, reading failure is not concentrated among particular types of schools or among specific groups of students. To the contrary, students who have difficulty reading represent a virtual cross-section of American children. They include rich and poor, male and female, rural and urban, and public and private school children in all sections of the country. According to the NAEP assessment, for example, nearly one-third (32 percent) of fourth graders whose parents graduated from college are reading at the ‘below basic’ level.”

Thank you Dr. Kay! So, it looks like the “Matthew Effect” doesn’t make much of a difference when it comes to struggling readers. Could it be that we haven’t given teachers the reading skills, tools, and strategies they need to actually teach students how to decode words?

I say, that's a fact.

What do you say?

Courtesy of NEIRtec.org

Phonemic awareness, typically a focus in grades K and 1, is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds of spoken words---for example, to know that "cat" consists of three sounds, /c/, /a/, and /t/; that the first sound matches the first sound of "cake" and that the last two sounds match those of "hat", "rat", "bat", and "that."

Understanding that words are made up of speech sounds, and being able to compare sounds in different words, divide words into constituent sounds, and blend sounds together to form words, all form an important foundation for learning to read.

Note that the word "phoneme" refers to the individual sounds of language, and that "phonemic awareness" is about awareness of speech sounds separate from written forms of language. One could have phoneme awareness without ever encountering a written language.

Computers can present a variety of phonemic awareness practice activities and provide feedback to students and reports to teachers about students' progress. Multimedia presentations can address many different learning styles by integrating sound, text, and moving images. These presentations can also accept input from a variety of sources by letting students enter responses by pointing, typing, or speaking.

For example, many software programs for young children incorporate matching activities in which students are asked to match a sound with pictures of objects that start with that sound, a sequence of sounds with the word they form when blended together, or pictures of objects with names that start with the same sound or which rhyme.

If you are looking for a reading software program there are some key questions to consider regarding the effectiveness of the technology to teach children to read and subsequently raise reading test scores.

1. Is a process established in your school or district for reading specialists, technology specialists, classroom teachers, and special educators to collaborate on reviewing the possibilities and recommending uses of technology to enhance reading instruction?

2. What technologies (hardware and software) are available in your school or district to support reading instruction? How are they currently being used? How are teachers prepared to use them effectively?

3. Which of the five components of effective reading instruction (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension) need to be strengthened in your school or district? Which technologies can enhance these components?

4. How is your school providing reading instruction to students who are reading below their grade levels? ESL students? Special needs students? How can technology support teachers in helping these students?

5. Is information being provided to parents about how technology can help their children learn to read both at school and at home?

Technology is redefining how we teach children to read. Incorporating reading technology into an individual school or school district can be challenging. If you are interested in learning more or getting a price quote, contact us at info@ReadingHorizons.com

Struggling readers, low-income students and English language learners are all students that can be considered “at-risk.” However, as pointed out in an Education Week article today, “Every Student is at Risk.” Here are some excerpts from the article by teacher, Eric Fox:

“…I battle ignorance, apathy, lack of vision, lack of motivation, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, disorganization, and a bad memory on a daily basis. I don't have enough degrees and have never been elected to public office, so much of what I say may not seem important. My view is minuscule. I can't see the landscape with trends and data points. I just see the trenches.

…Every child, adolescent, or young adult who enters our school doorways is at risk of not developing his or her potential. I've never heard an elementary student say, "I want to make meth when I grow up," or "I can't wait until I'm old enough to go to prison," or "When I'm a teen mom, I can really play house."”

- Eric Fox, Teacher, Jenks, OK

Every student struggles with something. No student has a perfect life. Every student needs an education that challenges them and helps them learn more about their interests and their possibilities.

Of course, struggling readers and English language learners are among the entire student population that are "at-risk" and researchers have found strategies that can help them reach their potential:

1. Explicit and systematic phonics-based curriculum
2. Multisensory, Orton Gillingham-based instruction
3. Positive reinforcement and a focus on strengths

In recent news it’s been revealed that more and more students are struggling with reading making the implementation of these strategies as important as ever. In fact, “at-risk” readers are in many instances becoming the norm.

By using these strategies with every student from the start of their education there will be less "at-risk" readers and teachers will have more time to focus on some of the other factors that make every student "at-risk of not developing his or her potential." 

Learn strategies for teaching “at-risk” readers with Reading Horizons free 30-day online training! >