READING PLUS

Silent reading development for 3rd grade and up

Who is Reading Plus for?

Reading Plus helps students practice the decoding skills developed doing Fast ForWord.  It helps build a left to right, consistent reading style with intermittent quizzes on comprehension, vocabulary prompts and speed adaptivity that helps cement reading automaticity and develop reading comprehension. It’s content ranges from 3rd to 12th grade.

What is Reading Plus?

Reading Plus® is a web-based reading tool that works on several important aspects of reading with comprehension, organized around a huge library of reading practice texts.  It also has eye-tracking exercises and vocabulary lessons to provide individualized scaffolded silent reading practice for students in grades 5 and higher.

Reading Plus® aims to develop and improve students’ silent reading fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary. Many of our older students  progress to Reading Plus after completing Fast ForWord.

Gemm Learning will help place students into Reading Plus at an  appropriate reading level.  They will then have a range of interesting texts to choose from that will challenge but not defeat.  Meanwhile, the constantly moving text frame that keeps them having to read helps them understand what fluent reading feels like. It will also help undo bad reading habits, the most common being jumping around while reading looking for familiar and recognizable words.

The Process

Reading Plus uses a combination of library texts designed to capture a child’s interest and onscreen tools to keep the silent reading in the groove.

Step 1: Reading test – with emphasis on reading speed and reading comprehension

Step 2: Students sessions include three options:

• Selections from a huge library, something for every student. The 10-15 minutes lessons include silent reading with most text blacked out to keep the student reading consistently at their pace. There are comprehensions questions at the end.
• Vocabulary and spelling.
• Visual tracking exercises.

Students have ownership of choice and can read stories of interest, with a game-like aspect being incentives to “unlock” new stories in their library as they progress.

Reading Plus uses comprehension questions and reading speed metrics to keep students progressing through the program, moving to higher levels of texts as benchmarks are met.

Results

Research suggests students need to complete 31 sessions to start seeing gains, that’s about 5 weeks averaging 2 hours a week.

Reading Plus®  is researched-backed, with dozens of studies, including this randomized study, reviewed by the Johns Hopkins University and described on the Evidence for ESSA website as providing strong evidence of program effectiveness.

For more study results here.