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Research shows that students whose teachers spend too much time talking are less likely to be engaged during classroom instruction. Luckily, reading instruction can be so much more than lecture, reading practice, memorization, or decoding drills. We, as teachers, can do more to get our students engaged in learning to read.

List of Reading Activities

Here is a list of fourteen student engagement strategies from a webinar presented by Reading Horizons Chief Education Officer, Stacy Hurst, that you can use to increase student engagement during reading instruction or reading intervention:

1. Partner Pretest

Before teaching a new decoding skill or grammar rule, preface the lesson with a pretest. Let your students know that you will not score the test, lowering anxiety and increasing student performance. Pair students up for the pretest and have them use the same set of materials. If the pretest is on a computer or iPad, have students share the device between the two of them. During the pretest, walk around the room to gauge student needs and adjust the lesson accordingly. When lesson material matches student ability and understanding, engagement is higher. Make sure that the pretest is similar to the posttest so you can see how much your students retain during your lesson.

2. Stand Up/Sit Down

You can use this activity to help students learn to differentiate between similar but different reading concepts. For instance, when you're trying to help your students understand the difference between common nouns and proper nouns, you can give examples of each and have students stand up if it is a common noun or sit down if it is a proper noun. This is a great way to see how much of your class is grasping the material while getting their blood flowing-helping them stay alert.

3. Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down

This activity provides a quick way to gauge if your students are comprehending a story or to test them on different reading skills. Instruct students to put their thumbs up if they agree with a statement or to put their thumbs down if they disagree. When students have a low energy level (i.e. right after lunch) Stand Up/Sit Down may be a better alternative. However, if you need to maintain your students' current energy level Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down is ideal.

4. Secret Answer

This activity is great for students that might not be confident in their answers-students that look around the class when doing Stand Up/Sit Down or Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down to see how the other students' answer before they answer themselves. To give students a secret way to answer, assign different responses a number and have students hold up the number of fingers that correspond to the answer they think is correct. To do this exercise properly, have your students place their hand near their heart (physically) with the appropriate number of fingers raised to indicate their answer. This way, especially if all the students are facing the teacher, it is difficult for students to copy their neighbor's answer.

5. Response Cards

This is a great way to mix things up a bit. Have students create a stack of typical responses, including agree/disagree, true/false, yes/no, greater than/less than, multiple-choice options, and everyday emotions. After students have created their response cards, you can have them use them to respond in various settings. For example, while reading a book together as a class, you may pause and ask your students what they think the character is feeling right now. The students then select one of the everyday emotion cards from their personal stack of cards and lift it up to answer the question.

6. Think-Pair-Share

This activity allows students to pause and process what they have just learned. After reading a passage in a book, ask your class a question that they must first consider by themselves. After giving them time to think, have them discuss the question with their neighbor. Once they've discussed the question, invite students to share their answers with the class. By giving them this time to process, you enable them to be more engaged in their learning.

7. Quick Writes

Studies show that the proper ratio of direct instruction to reflection time for students is ten to two. That means that teachers need to provide students with two minutes of reflection for every ten minutes of instruction. This activity is a great way to give students that much-needed reflection time! In this activity, ask a question about a reading passage and have students write a response to share with a neighbor or the entire class.

8. One Word Splash

After reading a passage or learning new vocabulary terms, ask your students to write down one word that they feel sums up that material. This might seem overly simplistic, but it requires higher processing skills to help your students digest what they are reading. Students can do this with pencil/paper or a dry erase marker/personal whiteboard.

9. Quick Draw

This activity is perfect for visual learners or students who aren't entirely writing yet. After reading a part of a story or learning a new concept or topic, have your students draw a picture about what they've just read or understood. For example, after reading part of the story Jack and the Beanstalk, have your students draw what has happened in the story up to that point. A student may draw a picture of a boy planting seeds with a beanstalk growing in the background.

10. Gallery Walk

To help students get some of their energy out, have them do a Gallery Walk to see their peers' work. This activity is an excellent add-on to Quick Writes and Quick Draw. Because students seek approval from their peers, they will put more effort into their work when they know the class will view it.

11. A-Z Topic Summary
Help students connect the dots after finishing a book, a learning module, or a lesson. Have your students complete an A-Z Topic Summary either as individuals or in pairs. If it is an individual activity, have students write either a word or a sentence that connects to the book, module, or lesson for each letter of the alphabet. For example, if you learned about baking, they might write a sentence for the letter A such as: "Always preheat the oven before baking." To speed up the activity, you can assign students to work in pairs or assign a letter to each student or team and have them write a sentence for that letter rather than the whole alphabet.
12. 3-2-1
This is a quick way to help students process reading or lesson material when you're pressed for time. First, have your students write three facts they learned from something they read or learned in class that day. Next, have students write two questions about the book or topic that wasn't covered or discussed in class. Finally, have your students write one opinion they have about the reading material or lesson. This activity can also help you plan for the next lesson on the topic or book.
13. Find Your Match
This is another activity that gets your students up and moving. Create card matches that correlate to a storyline in a book, vocabulary terms, figures of speech, grammar rules, etc. For example, your card matches might include the following concepts (depending on grade level): rhyming words, uppercase/lowercase, antonyms/synonyms, words/definitions, problem/solution, and words/pictures. Hand out one card to each student in the class and then get up and find the other student with the matching card.
14. Dictation
One of our favorite teaching activities is Dictation! It is highly effective in engaging students because it is multisensory explicit phonics instruction involving: auditory, visual, kinesthetic, and tactile senses. Having a multisensory approach increases working memory and integrates all language skills/modalities. To do Dictation, have students listen to a word, repeat the word out loud, write it out on paper, and then have them read the word out loud again. View an example of Dictation in action here . Have you tried any of these activities in your classroom? If so, leave a comment and let us know which ones are your favorites and why.

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14 Activities That Increase Student Engagement During Reading Instruction

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Research shows that students whose teachers spend too much time talking are less likely to be engaged during classroom instruction. The good news is that there are many activities that will enable you to spend less time talking and more time getting your students engaged during reading instruction.

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By Jennifer Serravallo
For years teachers have shared with me that they feel much more comfortable teaching reading than writing. "I read every night," they say, "But when it comes to writing, I don't really write myself. Except emails. Do emails count?"

I know in the days when I was in a multi-subject classroom, the thing that was hardest for me to teach was often the thing that I saved for last. I'd hope we'd run out of time, and then when we did, I'd roll my plans over to the following day.**

I am fortunate to be in the role of supporting teachers with their literacy instruction, and I want to try to help make the teaching of writing less scary, more do-able, more rewarding (for teachers and their students.)

One of the first stumbling blocks we need to work to overcome is student dependency on us, the teacher. Instead, we need to make it a point to support student engagement and independence. When your children are more excited about writing, that enthusiasm will spill over to you. From classroom environment, to partnerships, to editing, here are five ideas to get you started.

1. Set up your classroom with independence in mind

Offering students a writing center with materials they'll need during writing time can help free you up to confer with students instead of handing out supplies. Consider including paper choices; writing implements; reference materials; mentor texts; scissors, tape, and staplers (for rearranging drafts); and copies of classroom charts.

2. Make writing meaningful, and give students choice

It may sound like this suggestion will make it harder, but really it will do quite the opposite. When children have a choice in what they write about, and have meaningful purposes and a real audience for their writing, they will be automatically more invested and engaged. Here's a possible strategy you can teach to engage children in writing for social justice, inspired by some of the ideas from Katherine and Randy Bomer's For a Better World:

"Think about something you want to see happen, or that you want to change. That can give you an idea for a topic. Then, think about who has the power to change it. That can help you keep your audience in mind from the beginning. Think about what kind of writing will best get your idea across."

3. Find and use mentor texts

Every writer benefits from seeing an example of the kind of writing they are trying to write, and looking closely at that example can help a writer improve the quality of their own. Katie Ray in the classic Wondrous Words gives invaluable advice for how to use mentors across the writing process. She and others (Vicki Vinton and Mary Ehrenworth, Jeff Anderson) have written about the idea of using mentors on the sentence level to help with cadence and sentence variety. Here's a strategy you might share with students:

"Decide the kind of piece you're trying to write. In addition to genre, think about the sound or tone of the writing. Find a mentor or two who writes just like what and how you want to write. Read their writing once or twice to get the feel and sound of it in your mind. Draft your piece."

4. Establish partnerships to support each other across the process

In many classrooms, kids pair up and swap papers to do peer editing right before recopying a final version. Nancie Atwell ( In the Middle) warns us, though, that sometimes students insert more errors than they fix!

Instead, think about partners as being supports for students across the entire process. They can help each other plan out writing before drafting, rehearse a story or information piece aloud, be a listener to suggest changes that would help make the writing clearer, or prompt the writer to add more details. Here's one favorite routine I teach to students that works across the writing process:

5. Free yourself from being the class "editor"

You could collect every paper in the classroom, mark up the papers with the changes that need to be made (spelling, grammar, punctuation, word choice) and return the papers to be recopied. You'll get a great-looking piece at the end of it, but it wouldn't really reflect student learning. Then, during the next piece you'd need to spend hours being editor yet again.

Instead, teach students strategies for reading through their own piece and editing as best they can. Even if you teach just a handful of strategies during each unit, across they year they will have acquired more skills than if you'd simply corrected their paper for them. Here's a strategy, for example, that can help students consider mid-sentence punctuation:

These five ideas can make a huge difference in the level of engagement and independence in your writing classroom, which in turn will allow you to do more teaching and responding to your student writers.
** Comment below about your hardest-to-teach subject, and guess what mine was. I'll gift a copy of my newest book to the first person to guess correctly!
_____________
Jennifer Serravallo Jen began her career in education as a teacher in Title I schools in NYC and later joined the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University. As an independent consultant, she has spent over a decade helping teachers across the country to create literacy classrooms where students are joyfully engaged and instruction is meaningfully individualized to students' goals. Visit her blog and follow her on Twitter @jserravallo. is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Reading Strategies Book, and other popular Heinemann titles. Her latest is The Writing Strategies Book (2017), where you'll find literally hundreds of ideas like those she's shared here. (See our review.)

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Engagement and Independence Make Writing Instruction Fun

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By Jennifer Serravallo For years teachers have shared with me that they feel much more comfortable teaching reading than writing. "I read every night," they say, "But when it comes to writing, I don't really write myself. Except emails. Do emails count?"

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‎* THE No.1 Book app for the iPad in 90+ countries. * Common Sense Education Top Pick for Learning 2018 * AASL Best website for Teaching & Learning 2018 Book Creator is the simple way to make your own beautiful ebooks, right on your iPad.

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I love this app, but I'll give it a 3.5. I'd love it more if it was updated to something in-season each month, with holiday-week-only achievements, and perhaps more achievements in general. It's been in the Christmas theme since...well, last Christmas! 

In other words, PLEASE UPDATE!!! 

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‎From the makers of Shotgun Free and Air Guitar comes the best new way to increase your productivity...by pretending to punch anything that stands in your path. Read the best user testimonial ever received by an app: "Wait, do you just hold it in your hand and punch and it makes a punching noise?"

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Version 16.7.0

- We've added a new theme switcher. Select your favorite from a range of new themes!
- Optimized for iPhone XR + iPad Pro 11.

If you enjoy using this app, would you mind taking a moment to rate it on the App Store?

Genuinely fun games

As an elementary school Mandarin teacher and a life-long learner, I'm always on the lookout for good Mandarin apps. This one stands out as one of the most fun and most effective, because of the variety of well-designed games and the constant repetition of the words. I will definitely recommend this to my students. I like the graphics and especially the music. I get a kick out of the extra challenge to the memory game (the cards bounce and scatter). I don't like that in the match-3 game, you can have no moves at a certain point. Teaching characters is a challenge, but I think they're on the right track with the character game--again, especially because of the constant repetition on the sounds of the words. Great app! Can't wait for more vocab sets!!

Great app for little kids!

I love learning Chinese. I got this app for my 4-year-old brother, and he loves it! It's perfect for him because it does not require any reading skills, and it's really fun. After a short time using the app, he already knows how to say a couple of colors. I just bought the locked lessons.
I'm excited. I want him to be my little Chinese-speaking buddy!

Thanks!

6 year old says!

It's a really good Chinese program!

Thanks!

Information

Compatibility

Requires iOS 8.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

Languages

English, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian Bokmål, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Vietnamese

Copyright

© 2011-2018 Studycat Limited

In-App Purchases

1. Animals Lesson $2.99

2. Numbers Lesson $2.99

3. Vehicles Lesson $2.99
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Family Sharing

With Family Sharing set up, up to six family members can use this app.

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‎Mandarin Chinese Learning Games for Kids. Educational activities teach kids to read, speak & spell. * Free Chinese Lesson - 6 Learning Games! * Designed by language learning experts for kids aged 3-10 * Course for preschool, early learners & young children studying languages. * More than 6,000,000...

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✔ iPad + iPhone | kids app for ages 5-8+ years

Monki Chinese Class is a brand new app for learning to write and understand the Chinese language and it's characters, which had been designed especially for kids and was developed by Monkimun, who have truly published a remarkable educational app for kids. We can honestly say that we have not come across any better educational app, that introduces the Chinese writing, as child-friendly as this app does.

✔ Child-safe app | No Ads | Without In-App purchases
Learning to write Chinese characters
The Chinese writing has one special feature, that will surely attract childrens' attention: There are some Chinese characters, which fall into the category mnemonic or pictogram, which means that the actual characters look like the meaning of the word. The Chinese character for tree for example looks like a tree 木. If you ask kids, what the Chinese character for a person or people 人 looks like, they'd probably say it reminds them of a stickman.

Monki Chinese Class really knows how to skillfully make use of this fascinating aspect in order to instantly attract kids interest. The app offers kids a total of 22 relatively easy characters including interactive writing games to discover and learn, thereunder also the two examples tree and person, which we have mentioned already.
It all depends on the line stroke
Each word is presented with a interactive writing instruction, where kids learn the correct direction of the strokes. After the demonstration, kids get to trace the lines themselves with the help of the guidelines. Afterwards as a reward, the meaning of the character is illustrated to the kids with funny animations and sounds, which makes the character come to life.

As you can see on the screenshots, the meaning of the words is also additionally shown underneath the characters. A native speaker is also naming the correct pronunciation of the Chinese words. Kids who cannot yet read will basically learn the meaning of the words through the illustrations and animations, as there is no English narrational translation of the words.
Great value for money
Monki Chinese Class is available for free on the App Store and with this free app, you're able to use half of the content for free. If you're happy with the app, you can download the full version via one in-app purchase for $ 1.99, which has also been provided with a child protection.
YouTube video trailer
In our YouTube video, we write our personal favorite characters and demonstrate the three steps, which are used to learn each character with. At the highest level, the auxiliary lines disappear and children write the characters of their memory.

Monki Chinese Class | Kids app rating

Even if you weren't specifically looking for a Chinese learning app for your kids, we can still highly recommend you this app, as it is free and there is lots to discover. Monki Chinese Class is really good in drawing kids attention to the Chinese characters. There are many Ooh's and Aaah's! Lots of experiences are waiting for kids such as the combination of two characters. Example: What's the meaning for fire 火 and mountain 山 together? The answer can be found in the app.

By the way, the age recommendation of the app developer is 8 years, but we can recommend the app for younger children already.

Pro's
(+) Draws interest to Chinese language characters/meaning
(+) Chinese characters come to life
(+) Half of the content is available for free
(+) Native narration

Con's
(-) Translation is only visible in writing

Top best apps for kids rating: "Editor's Choice"

kids app developer: Monkimun

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Monki Chinese Class | kids app for learning Chinese, it's characters and meanings - TOP BEST APPS FOR KIDS

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✔ iPad + iPhone | kids app for ages 5-8+ years Monki Chinese Class is a brand new app for learning to write and understand the Chinese language and it's characters, which had been designed especially for kids and was developed by Monkimun, who have truly published a remarkable educational app for kids.

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I was really impressed by the app and was thinking about buying the full version. However, the store does not list the current price, only the full price, which is pretty high. I can't buy something without knowing exactly how much it will cost.

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‎30 Million children love this app for learning Chinese. This app is used by kids with basic Chinese to learn Chinese characters. Even if you can't follow along with the story, skip ahead to the vocabulary practice! There are tons of games to learn vocabulary, improve pronunciation and practice. S...

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Dobble - Dobble is the award-winning visual perception card game for 2-8 players aged 6 and above that can be played by anyone, regardless of age and interests. In