Middle School Literacy Skills:  An Elective that Provides a Boost!

Literacy Skills is a class in the middle school through the Optimal Learning Center (OLC) that is designed to teach students strategies that will foster the comprehension skills, reading fluency, and writing skills that are essential for success in all academic areas. 

In addition to the writing instruction, two new reading programs were implemented this year.  The first semester, students are introduced to the SRA Reading Laboratory.  A well known and time tested program, it provides individualized skills instruction, permits independent work, promotes students’ sense of responsibility and lets each student move at his or her own rate, according to individual ability.  Not only that, the reading material is a balanced collection of fiction and nonfiction short stories and articles providing a great deal of incidental learning about plants, animals, history, science, technology, discovery, and much more that students truly enjoy reading.

The second reading program is called Thinking Reader which was introduced via a novel called Bud, Not Buddy, at the beginning of the second semester.  The goal of this program is to increase students’ reading comprehension by training them to read strategically using a grade level novel.  Thinking Reader employs the following seven proven reading comprehension strategies – summarize, question, clarify, predict, visualize, feeling and reflect.  By teaching students to find comfort in using these strategies, Thinking Reader not only increases reading comprehension, it gives students tools that they can apply in an organized way, independently, with any piece of literature, whenever they are having difficulty comprehending what they read.

If you have any questions or would like to see either of these programs, feel free to contact the Literacy Skills teacher Amanda Anderson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . 

Happy reading!