EduCon 2025Level Up Literacy: Empowering Advanced Readers with Self-Paced, Engaging, and Cross-Content Units in Early Grades
How do we facilitate the continued development of masterful students as readers while concurrently allowing them to embrace the joys of being in early grades (k-2)? How can we, teachers, navigate between challenging these students and using developmentally appropriate practices? In the past year, our school noticed students in the lower grades reading levels have a large variance from learning to read to reading to learn. We questioned how we can meet the needs of our students while also staying within the curriculum and standards of the grade level. To solve this problem, I created digital self-paced novel studies that encourage students to expand their vocabulary, think deeply, and make connections across content areas through multisensory modalities. Students can take control of their learning by moving through a game-like platform to complete activities at each “level” (chapter) of their book. Students collaborate by sharing videos of their predictions and thoughts to an online classroom platform. Together we will discuss the challenges teachers face with differentiating instruction, brainstorm ideas to improve and expand differentiation in reading, and walk away with strategies and tools to use in your classroom.
Conversational Practice
Objective: Discuss school's observed reading level variances in K-2 and the challenge of balancing rigorous literacy goals with age-appropriate joy and exploration.
Participants/instructor will: 1. Share challenges they’ve faced in differentiating instruction for early readers. 2. Demonstrate an overview of how students progress through each “level” while engaging in novel-based activities and connecting with others in the class through different tech tools (WordWall, Blooket, Canva, Screencastify, AI etc…) 3. Divide into small groups to walk through a mock chapter activity as if they were students. 4.Brainstorm how they could implement or adapt a similar model in their classrooms to encourage joyful reading practices. 5. Discuss balancing rigor with developmentally appropriate practices and encourage attendees to share additional strategies they use to differentiate reading instruction. 6. Conclude with providing resources and QR codes to access sample digital templates for their use.
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