Since 1984 when Reading Recovery began in the United States, 1.6 million first grade students have been served by Reading Recovery.

Lessons

Children meet individually with a Reading Recovery teacher, 30 minutes each day for an average of 12 to 20 weeks. The lessons provide a balanced, structured approach so that literacy develops along a broad front and students can apply skills in reading and writing. Each lesson consists of reading familiar books, reading yesterday’s new book, working with letters and/or words using magnetic letters, writing a story, assembling a cut-up story, and reading a new book. The teacher creates opportunities for the child to problem solve and provides just enough support to help the child develop strategic behaviors to use on texts in both reading and writing.

The following components are integrated across a Reading Recovery lesson, carefully tailored to the needs of each child:

• phonological awareness
• visual perception of letters
• word recognition
• phonics/decoding skills
• phonics/structural analysis
• fluency/automaticity
• comprehension

The objective of Reading Recovery lessons is to promote accelerated learning so that students catch up to their peers, close the achievement gap as quickly as possible, and continue to learn independently. Learn more about Reading Recovery lessons on the Reading Recovery Council of North America Web site.

Help for Spanish speakers

Reading Recovery is available for children who are having difficulty learning to read and write in classrooms where the language of instruction is Spanish. The Spanish version of Reading Recovery, Descubriendo la Lectura, provides comparable results for lowest-performing students.