Why Short Reads

Choosing Short Text

Using Short Reads

Choosing a Short Text

Your students should ideally be reading texts at a level appropriate to their reading development, or have teaching support to help them access texts outside their normal reading range.

Choosing a text within a student's reading range

To determine a good fit between the students and the short text, you can use:
subjective data including:

• student's prior knowledge of or interest in the topic
• support provided during reading (e.g. the text being read aloud).

objective assesment—Short Reads Non-fiction text was assessed in three ways:

• colour wheel/book bands
• Reading level (as levelled by Scholastic)
• Lexile (as levelled by MetaMetrics).

Choosing a text beyond a student's reading range

You might choose a text that is outside a student's normal range, perhaps because the text fits with a classroom study topic, or because students are not from English-speaking backgrounds.
You can support students by:

• providing background information about the topic
• clariftying the vocabulary in advance
• reading the text aloud
• using 'think aloud' techniques to model ways to access the text
• actively engaging the students in conversation about what they've read.