As teachers who teach every child in the school, we all know that many of our students are struggling to learn. We watch them from kindergarten when everything is exciting and new, to 2nd grade, when they are starting to get that they aren’t learning at the same rate as their classmates. Fast forward to 5th grade, and they’ve just given up. They can be afraid to try, or they may be angry and sullen. It’s heartbreaking to watch our kindergarten babies become sad and disconnected from school.
What you may not know is the long-term consequences of being a struggling reader. Leaving school without basic reading skills affect every area of life. Struggling readers can expect:
- Lower levels of achievement long term
- More likely to drop out of school
- More likely to engage with the criminal justice system
- Higher levels of unemployment
- Reduced earning potential
- Lower chances for success in the work place
As a teacher, you just hate to see your babies struggling, but these long-term consequences not only affect your students’ lives. They also affect society and our economy as a whole. That’s why it’s important to help our struggling readers as much as we can. You have the ability to be a world changer. Music is intrinsically connected to reading. You use the same lingo as reading teachers, and you teach similar skills. You can reach your students in a completely different way that leaps over the road block your struggling readers have built.
Literacy Tip Tuesday is a weekly series is designed to give you the basic skills to add literacy skills to your classroom without watering down your own curriculum. Join me every week for a new literacy tip, designed to help you be a world changer. We can truly change our student’s lives by just adding some simple strategies. Join me every Tuesday!
Are you looking for something more comprehensive? Do you want to learn all the skills you need to help your students and then more? I’ve got you teacher. Simply Literacy Skills is a course designed to teach you everything you need to know to quickly and easily add great reading strategies to your curriculum.