Engaging Reading Blocks: Hour of Gold Reading Block

Super Engaging Reading Blocks: 50 Ways to Make Reading Fun and Engaging for All Students

1. Student interest and curiosity leads the ELA curricula
2. Keep ELA teacher led READING lessons short (micro lectures)
3. Use Kagan cooperative learning structures 
4. KEEP IT FUN! When in doubt through it out 

My Top Picks for Engaging Reading Blocks:

1. Read and follow along with the teacher or audio books
2. Make your own fluency passages from high interest literature like the Guardians of the Galaxy movie script
3. Sing lots of songs, chants, and cheers
4. Play The Legendary Lands Vocabulary Game
5. Read aloud advanced literature that offers 1000's of teachable moments (literary terms, elements, devices, and techniques, text features)

The Hour of Gold Reading Block is Curiosity and Child Driven, Not
Data Driven. Think of The Hour of Gold Reading Block as your front row ticket to Cirque du Soleil. The Gold Hour is the reading block of your dreams, no workbooks, no weekly unit test, no Smart board widgets, no basal readers, and no end of year (EOG/EOC) State reading assessments! Your students' curiosity and passions drive the reading block.
The Hour of Gold Reading Block is all about creating a deep love of reading, learning, emotive questioning, critical thinking, and optimizing reading enjoyment/engagement. Reading blocks today can be over structured, over scheduled, and at times they can be outright boring and actually kill the joy of reading. Published reading programs seem to be based on test prep, leaving the reading process more tedious, dull, and monotonous. Reading blocks that rely on basal readers and worksheets leave most students flat and unengaged. Students that absolutely love reading, read more and inevitably do better on state reading test. Maybe we need to rethink the basal based reading block and publisher made busy work-books. Imagine if we completely focused on the joy and love of reading and language ARTS.

Hour of Gold Reading Block Goals:

1. Increasing all students' love and enjoyment of learning and reading. 
2. Decreasing substantially the number of students that struggle, hate, and/or avoid reading.
3. Moving from students with reading difficulties and/or an aversion to reading to engaged motivated readers and learners.
4. Building dynamic listening, speaking, reading, and the foundations of cogent written communication. 

50 Ideas for the Hour of Gold Reading Block:

Daily Oral Language and Oracy Practice:

• 1. Go on virtual field trips! 2. Bring virtual and augmented reality to classroom reading activities using Google Cardboard and Google Expedition 360; 3. Sing lots of songs, chants, and cheers; 4. Listen and read along with audio books; 4. Recite and recitation of emotive/thought provoking poems, maxims, and mottoes; 5. Incorporating sentence frames and sentence stems/starters when practicing academic listening and speaking; 6. Incorporating drama/comedy, sharing jokes and riddles; 7. Read alouds, more read alouds, and yes more read alouds; 8, Engage student discussions and dialogue with Socratic seminars and philosophical chairs. 9. Real walking field trips to local parks, stores, churches, restaurants, urban farms, gyms, and/or professional offices; 10. MORE SINGING, MORE AUTHENTIC LISTENING AND SPEAKING, MORE QUESTIONS, AND MORE TPR total physical response.

Daily Phonemic Awareness and Phonics (Preschool-3rd):

• 11. Use ALL the CREATIVE arts and all the modalities to explore the relationship between songs, rhyming, rhythms, music, lyrics, sounds, and written symbols; 12. Play auditory processing "Phonemic Awareness" and "Phonics" visual spacial games; 13. Incorporate the visuals arts and multi-sensory scaffolds to teach the sound-spelling relationships of phonics; 14. Use songs, rhyming, rhythms, and music to boost phonemic awareness; 15. Read poetry and explore the patterns, cadence/meter, richness of rhyming and rhythms of language. 16. Get up and sing, PLAY, move, dance, and create art!

Daily Fluency Practice:

• 17. Reading fluency is your students playground, an opportunity to be actors and comedians; 18. Make your own fluency passages from high interest literature like Guardians of the Galaxy movie script; 19. Make reading fluency practice into a game, compaction, an exciting goal setting challenge; 20. Read jokes, read riddles, read plays, read menus, read game rules, read song lyrics, read movie scripts, read a page from a chapter book, and don't get stuck reading prepackaged boring fluency drills; 21. Read list of sight words; 22, Read chorally and echo read; 23. Read and follow along with audio books; 24. Read with a buddy, 24. And ALWAYS Repeat what you read!

Daily Academic Vocabulary Practice: 

• 25. Read aloud advanced literature that offers 1000's of teachable moments (literary terms, elements, devices, and techniques, text features); 26. Use advanced collegiate language "English 101-202", with all students, even with the primary grades; 27. Daily high interest read alouds that engage and expose student to advanced tier 2 and tier 3 academic vocabulary; 28. Incorporate project and phenomenon based learning that fuses all content areas and exposes students to real world vocabulary; 29. Language and concepts, students build their own word-walls based on their interest using using the three step process; 30. Confer with students on a regular bases to to check their choices of words and their level of understanding; 31. Celebrate the joy of learning new words and new concepts especially the words and concepts students are interested in learning; 32. incorporate internet based AI virtual assistant to speed the process of word spelling and term acquisition; 33. Incorporate Flocabulary; 34. Play Legendary Lands Vocabulary game; 35. Incorporate Hot dots Self-Paced Learning; 36. and Add Lakeshore Board ELA Learning games.

Daily Reading Comprehension Practice:

• 37. Teach students how to develop independent cogent readers skills, close reading and analytical reading strategies; 38. Incorporate Socratic seminars and philosophical chairs; 39. Incorporate Inside-outside circle; 40. Incorporate THINK, PAIR, SHARE; 41. Start a RTI READING BOOT CAMP; 42 Incorporate "Opinion" Take a Stand 43. Use TEXT CODING  and MARKING THE TEXT; 44. Incorporate Close Reading Jigsaw; 45. Practice listening comprehension daily. 46. Read the rainbow and think,"how can we read outside of the box", comic books, choose your own adventures, graphic novels, Horrible Histories, 47, Watch Japanese anime movie and read the subtitles; 48. Read varied and vast literature and cast a wide net; 49. Read Shakespeare, The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, Grimms' original Fairy Tales; 50. Read, research, study and learn before you take your virtual field trips, again bring virtual and augmented reality to classroom activities using Google Cardboard/Google Expedition 360; 51. Create or watch a BBC 60 Second Shakespeare;