Proven Ways to Make Your Students Excited About Literacy Instruction? Absolutely!

Meaningful literacy gains and student engagement go hand in hand. Here’s how to make literacy fun.

Effective literacy instruction includes…

• Phonemic awareness
• Phonics
• Fluency
• Vocabulary
• Comprehension

While reading wars continue to surge in the education world, many districts are revamping their approach to reading instruction. Schools adopted the science of reading as a means to promote student literacy. Teams pour themselves into student data and reflect on their findings to improve their literacy instruction. Yet, educators still feel lost in making their literacy instruction both impactful and engaging.

It’s no surprise teachers feel this way. Many educators report that their undergraduate and graduate courses didn’t teach them about how students learn to read. Once they’re in the classroom, the ever-changing curricula (and accompanying professional development) deepen teachers’ uncertainty with their own pedagogy.

Educators know how important literacy is to successful students. But making the act of reading engaging can be a struggle. Furthermore, educators know that without that engagement, student literacy won’t improve.

Gamification is one great way to keep things fun and fresh for students. So how else can we keep kids excited about literacy learning?

Here are the top 7 reading activities to help students feel excited about reading.

Educators are always looking for ways to level up their reading instruction to promote literacy in their classrooms. Below are some ways to incorporate elements of the science of reading in ways that will motivate your students to participate.

#1: Make literacy a social act

Partner reading helps students hear how another student approaches the same piece. While they partner read, have students react to their reading with questions and comments in real time. Glose’s in-text annotations promote a virtual discussion. Students read what their classmates share and upvote the most thought-provoking comments.

#2: Create a sentence unscrambling competition

Students love a good challenge. Chop up several different sentences from the class reading and have students put them back together. Have students reassemble the sentences in small groups. Whoever finishes first and accurately gets a prize or incentive!

#3: Reading as a daily practice

Many teachers have warm-ups, bell ringers, or other beginning-of-class activities. Another fun way to promote literacy is to have students read a book for 5–10 minutes at the beginning of class or any time a transition occurs. This helps students to quiet down, get focused, and engage in their academics.

Teachers can also select an interesting part of a favorite book to generate interest. Reading texts aloud models fluency and what good reading should sound like.

#4: Fun with fluency

Work with students to create a class-made “emotions spinner” (or pre-make one). Emojis, colors, various objects, or words can represent emotions like anger, sadness, excitement, or joy on each part of the spinner.

Select a sentence or two from an in-common text and have students take turns spinning and reading the sentence in the assigned emotion. Discuss how the emotion, tone, and voice impact the meaning of the sentence. Have students break up into small groups to practice on their own. This activity promotes fluency and encourages students to practice emphasis and intonation in their reading: two huge factors in reading comprehension.

#5: Go on a vocabulary scavenger hunt

Pull vocabulary words from an in-class reading selection. (If you teach middle school or high school students, have students collect their own vocabulary words.) These can be specific to the text or commonly-used words that help readers create meaning.

Instruct students to find examples of each word in real-world content. They can work in teams or individually to find the words in other books, magazines, advertisements, commercials, and movie or television clips that showcase the vocabulary word. Create a class file where students can access meaningful examples.

#6: Whole-body phonics

Research shows that young readers or struggling readers respond well to phonics instruction when the whole body is incorporated. The physical movement helps retain letter-sound recognition.

For older students or more established readers, educators can have students create their own words with different phonics sounds, prefixes, and suffixes. Given how quickly new slang words come about on social media, middle school and high school students will enjoy creating a made-up word! Post the word meanings on a wall to display to the entire class for greater incentive and rapport. Bonus points for you (and your students) if you can use the word in context during class. It’ll be your little inside joke!

#7: Explicitly teach reading strategies cyclically

Teach reading strategies and circle back to them often. Students need ample exposure to good reading habits to help promote their comprehension skills. Therefore, educators can explicitly teach the following:

• Prior knowledge
• Inference
• Monitoring
• Questioning
• Visualizing
• Summarizing
• Context clues

Once students have a firm understanding of each strategy, incorporate literature circles into their in-class readings. Literature circles are an engaging way for students to practice reading comprehension. Check out our blog on how to implement them for more information.

Literacy learning continues to be among the top discussions in education. And it’s for good reason. Teaching students how to read, enjoy reading, and sustain readership is a lifelong skill. For many students, those skills don’t come naturally. We have to foster them. Educators know this.

Reading instruction doesn’t need to be dry! The more thoughtfully crafted the instruction, the more engaged students become. Often, just a few small tweaks and updates to a lesson are all that is needed to create student buy-in. And once you have that, the magic happens.