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Reading Rockets offers a wealth of reading strategies, lessons, and activities designed to help young children learn how to read and read better. Our reading resources assist parents, teachers, and other educators in working with struggling readers who require additional help in reading fundamentals and comprehension skills development.

Families Reading Together

Families Reading Together

Reading every day with your child is the most important thing you can do to help nurture curiosity and knowledge about the world, strengthen vocabulary and comprehension skills, and model the joy of reading. You can mix it up with some oral storytelling, too (improv style) — your kids will love the invented stories and might even jump in with ideas of their own. Here are 26 tips for building reading into your everyday life. For more ideas and articles, visit our Reading Together section.


NEW! Adventures in Reading: Family Literacy Bags

Family Literacy Bags

Looking for a way to spark your students' at-home reading? Try these theme-based family activity packs designed by Reading Rockets to inspire conversation, creativity, and hands-on fun centered around books. Just download and print the colorful activity sheets, add the recommended fiction and nonfiction books, assemble everything into a bag, and send home with your students.

See our family literacy bags >

Read related article on family literacy bags >

Books & Authors

Every Picture Tells a Story: Our Interview with
Eric Rohmann

Eric Rohmann

"It's not a linear thing — it's more like a spider web." That's how Caldecott-winning illustrator and author Eric Rohmann describes his very fluid creative process. To capture the look and feel for My Friend Rabbit, Rohmann experimented with clay models, paper cutouts, watercolor, and finally woodcut — whose chunky, energetic lines felt just right.

Watch Eric Rohmann interview >

First People: Honoring Native Americans

Navajo Legend

"The world is full of stories, and from time to time they permit themselves to be told." Celebrate storytelling traditions during American Indian/Alaska Native Heritage Month with this lively collection of pourquoi stories, trickster tales, and familiar legends.

Go to book list >


Listen in as Narragansett storyteller Tching shares Rabbit's Wish for Snow — a winsome tale that explains how willow trees and rabbits came to look the way they do.

For more Native American book recommendations and links to classroom activities and other web resources, browse our sister site Colorín Colorado.

The Circle Goes Round: Family Stories

Black Is Brown Is Tan

Eat together, play together, laugh together, dream together. That's what families do, and families of all colors and kinds are celebrated in this joyful gathering of books just right for bedtime, story time, anytime.

Go to book list >

Features

Comprehension: Getting the Meaning Off the Page

Comprehension is why we read and the ultimate goal in all reading instruction. Watch this panel of reading experts discuss the building blocks of comprehension, what good instruction looks like, assessing comprehension in kids with dyslexia, and more. You'll also see inside a third grade classroom that's having success using the "Theme Scheme" strategy to help students make connections with the text. Excerpted from our webcast Make Reading Count.

Comprehension;


These articles, selected from our section on comprehension, provide insight into what comprehension is and classroom strategies that really work:

School Psychologists: New Roles in Helping Struggling Readers

School psychologists play a critical role in the lives of children who are struggling to learn. And that role is changing and expanding — for example, more and more school psychologists are involved in assessment and placements that impact students from the very beginning of their school lives.

Community

Hot Topics for Webcasts: Cast Your Vote!

Webcast Survey

Reading Rockets is planning new professional development webcasts for 2009 and we want your feedback on topic ideas. If you would like to share your thoughts, please take a moment to complete this brief survey. Let us know which topics are of interest to you as a parent or educator, and enter the drawing to win a 1-GB USB flash drive.

Take the survey >

Follow Us on Twitter

ReadingRockets

Connect with Reading Rockets on our new Twitter page. You'll find links to the newest articles on reading and writing, highlights from the literacy calendar, inspiring quotes from children's book authors, dispatches from literacy events, and more.

Go to Reading Rockets on Twitter >


Featured Partner: National Association of School Psychologists (NASP)

NASP

NASP supports school psychologists to help children and youth succeed academically, socially, and emotionally. Join NASP in promoting School Psychology Awareness Week, November 10–14, and "Making a Difference" in our children's lives.

Learn more about School Psychology Awareness Week >

Tips & News from Reading Rockets

  • Extra! Extra! Ed Extras, our free monthly service, offers preschools, elementary schools, and PTOs pre-formatted articles in both English and Spanish to include in parent newsletters. Sign up to receive the November article on reading nonfiction with kids.

  • Reading Rockets News. Take a look at the current issue of our popular monthly e-newsletter all about reading.