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​The long Minnesota winter is finally over! The snow is gone, the air is warmer, the sun is shining (sometimes), and now that daylight savings is here, the days suddenly feel longer. As much as I love spring (and truly I do!), it causes me some dismay, because I know how its arrival can negatively impact the work ethic of some students. Read more

This month we applaud Nathanael V. for being named our March Star of the Month. Nathanael is a fourth grade student at Kamala Elementary School in Oxnard, CA. Read more

Does highlighting text as you’re reading it help you learn it better? Is intelligence fixed at birth? Do people have primary learning styles, such as auditory or visual? Do right-brained and left-brained people learn differently? A recent survey of over 3,000 Americans shows that the majority of people answer some of these questions incorrectly. Which questions are they? Do you know the right answers? Take this quiz to find out. Read more

Picture a struggling reader in your mind. What age is the student? When many people think about struggling readers, they don’t picture teenagers or adults. And yet many middle-school, high-school, and adult learners struggle with reading. To help them achieve literacy, an effective intervention is crucial. Unfortunately, many reading interventions are geared toward younger students. The educators on the Read Naturally team have been aware of this problem since well before the company began in 1991. From the beginning, we have insisted that our programs feature high-interest, nonfiction content. The primary reason for this is so that a Read Naturally intervention can work for a learner of any age. Read more

In her recent blog post All Improvement Is Not Equal!, Read Naturally founder Candyce Ihnot explores the relationship between the number of Read Naturally Live stories her students had read between Fall and Winter and their fluency improvement during that time period. Candyce discovered that the students who had read the most stories had made the greatest gains. Dr. Danielle Dupuis of the University of Minnesota's Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement made the same discovery in her recent analysis of extant data from Read Naturally Live students. Read more

It was the first day of the semester, and my Creative Writing professor asked us to introduce ourselves to the class. As part of the introduction, we were to name the book we were currently reading. I froze. I wasn’t reading a book at the time. It had been a busy month, and I hadn’t taken the time to read anything beyond a few news articles and the back of the cereal box. As my turn approached, I weighed my choices. I could either lie and name a book I had read in the past, or I could tell the truth and risk making a bad first impression. I’m a terrible liar, so I chose the latter. “I’m not actually reading a book at the moment,” I said, nervously. Read more

​Imagine you purchase a new workout machine for your home. It’s a top-of-the-line machine, with all the bells and whistles, and it works like a dream. You’re so enamored with the machine that you’re actually motivated to work out! At first. A few weeks or months later, the machine loses its luster and working out doesn’t feel quite as exciting anymore. Does this sound familiar? I hate to tell you this, but it’s not the machine’s fault! Read more

It was the first week of February, and I was just completing the winter benchmark assessment of my Read Live students. I celebrated the student’s fluency gains, and I reminded them that their improvement was due to their own efforts. But, even while celebrating, I noticed something alarming that my students couldn’t. The amount of improvement among my students was far from equal. Read more

Our February Read Naturally Star of the Month is Jorge E. from Derwood, MD. Jorge is a sixth-grade ESOL student at Redland Middle School. His teacher, Deborah Romano, nominated him for his newfound self confidence and improved reading skills. Read more

About 5 million public school students in the United States today are English Language Learners (ELLs). National Public Radio (NPR) recently conducted a robust research project entitled 5 Million Voices, which set out to discover who these students are and how our public schools are serving them. Read more