Reading Courses

Close Reading Strategies for Fiction 
The Close Reading Strategies for Fiction course covers the multisensory, explicit, sequential learning of the art of understanding various fiction genres—how to analyze, synthesize, and use critical thinking skills to understand fictional text. Students learn the structure of narrative writing with the assistance of graphic organizers, vocabulary development exercises, and class discussions. This course is a great starting place for those with developing reading comprehension skills. The course may be combined with Expository Reading Comprehension or taken singly.  

Comprehension Imagery 
The Comprehension Imagery course covers the multisensory, explicit, sequential learning of the art of concept imaging in order to increase the ability to form pictures or “movies” in one’s mind while reading. This skill expands language and reading comprehension, reasoning, critical thinking, and expressive language skills. This course is for students who have an underdeveloped ability to picture and remember scenes while they read, dramatically affecting comprehension, memory, and critical thinking. 

Reading Between the Lines 
Reading Between the Lines allows students to hone their skills at making inferences. In order to infer meaning from text, readers must combine information from the text with their own background knowledge to make a theory about what is possibly true. Students will practice the skill using a variety of media, such as short film clips, photos, cartoons, song lyrics, and short passages from a variety of reading materials. When students have gained proficiency, they will apply the skill to short stories. 

Reading Development 
The Reading Development course teaches the multisensory development of advanced decoding skills through understanding of linguistic structures (phonetic and meaning-based patterns in words of Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Greek, and French origins), grammar, multisyllabic word attack, vocabulary development, and specific comprehension and encoding (spelling) approaches. Reading Development is for students who need further explicit instruction to improve decoding and related reading skills after Word Attack Skills or Reading Tutorial. 

Reading Fluency 
Description: The Reading Fluency course covers the development of reading fluency through intensive oral and silent reading practice linked with comprehension, multisyllabic word recognition mastery, and vocabulary development. This course is for students whose reading speed/accuracy is below expectations and impairs memory and comprehension of what is read. This course may be taken more than once. 

Reading for Academic Purposes 
Reading for Academic Purposes covers the multisensory, explicit, sequential learning of the art of understanding nonfiction text through focusing on collecting, organizing, and synthesizing information in that text. Graphic organizers, teacher modeling, class discussion, notetaking, and summarizing are presented, with a particular emphasis on identifying main ideas and supporting details. This course is for students who have developing comprehension skills with academic text. This course may be combined with the Reading Comprehension for Fiction course or taken singly. 
 
Reading Tutorial 
The Reading Tutorial course provides a multisensory, alphabetic-phonetic, and sequential approach to basic word attack, reading, spelling, and writing skills, explicitly teaching the association between written symbols and their spoken sounds and the correspondence between the sequences of sounds and the sequences of letters. Students read words in isolation, participate in sound dictations, spell targeted words and sentences, read orally from appropriate skill-level trade books, and write short pieces. This course is designed for students with significant weakness in basic decoding skills, who may also have coexisting challenges that would cause difficulty making effective progress in a group of more than three students. Students appropriate for Reading Tutorial are in need of individualized, explicit, intense instruction in order to make effective progress. This course may be taken with the permission of the Reading Department and may be taken more than once. 

Selected Short Stories 
The Selected Short Stories course provides an opportunity for students served by the Reading Department to continue sharpening their vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension skills. Through reading carefully selected literature, students will continue to foster a love of reading while exploring short stories. This course can be used as a precursor for literature courses in the English Department. 

The Novella 
The Novella course provides an opportunity for students served by the Reading Department to enjoy the classics while sharpening their vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension skills. By working with carefully selected literature, students will continue to foster a love of reading while exploring classic novellas. This course can be used as a precursor for literature courses in the English Department. 

Word Attack Skills 
The Word Attack Skills course teaches the multisensory development of decoding skills through recognition and understanding of linguistic structures (phonetic and meaning-based patterns in words of Anglo-Saxon and Latin origins), multisyllabic word attack, and vocabulary development, and specific comprehension and encoding skills. This course is for students with emerging multisyllablic decoding and spelling abilities, perhaps causing dysfluent reading and poor comprehension.