You will be amazed at how much your students will love Reading Karate! This is a great solution for motivating readers at all levels while improving fluency and comprehension.
There are very good reasons why Reading Karate has sold over 3000 copies: teachers know it works.
I promise you that it is so easy, you will wonder why you never tried it before.
Reading Fluency
A core problem for struggling readers is that they struggle with 3 key areas:
- Decoding
- Sight Words
- Automaticity with words, phrases and sentences
Kids who struggle in these areas are deficient in their uptake process: they read so slowly that they miss words, punctuation, have little prosody…and the comprehension sinks. We have all seen it happen, especially in the upper grades.
It is critical for these students to read a lot at their level, and we often don’t have time for that in the classroom. For example, you and I both know that teaching 4th grade curriculum doesn’t leave a lot of time to have a child practice at a Guided Reading Level of J.
Somehow we have to get them doing a lot of repeated and independent reading on their own time. Reading Karate can help address this because it is meant to be independent and provides multiple opportunities for practice at the zone of proximal development if the teacher implements it correctly.
Motivation to Read
One year I had a student who struggled to read. He also did everything he could to distract himself and others during our Daily Five literacy time.
I asked him what he felt about reading. His answer broke my heart.
“Mrs. Dipple, I just don’t like reading. Nobody reads to me at home and I have never read a book that I was excited about.”
How sad is that? However, this little guy LOVED sports. He lived and breathed football, soccer, baseball…anything that was physical he prioritized (as did his parents). So guess what happened when I introduced Reading Karate?
Suddenly there was a smart guy reading books like crazy because he was competing with himself and earning something that was symbolic of an achievement. I couldn’t believe it.
Suddenly reading became important, interesting and fun!
Reading Comprehension
With each belt level in Reading Karate there are comprehension exercises that hold the students accountable for the books they are reading. These worksheets and reports build in difficulty so the students gain confidence and are asked to reply at a more in-depth level when they are ready.
I always pre-teach how to use each comprehension exercise by doing a whole-class lesson. For example, I choose a short read aloud for my literacy lesson. After reading and discussing it, I show the students how to do the comprehension lesson. I always show them a very poor example along with a terrific example so they see what is expected.
Not all students will be at the same level at the same time. That’s ok. Just demonstrate the lessons as you see fit, then use them for anchor charts.