It is an important part of our mission to provide evidence-based literacy resources for educators and families. These resources created by the Iowa Reading Research Center provide opportunities to teach and provide student practice opportunities for various reading and writing skills, as well as offering other guidance and information through a variety of literacy resources listed below. Resources created by IRRC collaborators are tagged "Collaborator Contribution."
Step-by-step guidance for middle- and high-school students on writing a play. This will be particularly helpful for beginning playwrights and can be used with teacher or caregiver guidance or independently. The guide includes a glossary of playwriting terms.
In order to support families with children who may be participating in virtual instruction or otherwise learning at home, this guide offers tips on establishing home learning areas, improving the home-based learning experience, and utilizing web resources for students kindergarten-Grade 6 and Grades 7-12 in the subjects of English-language arts, science, social studies, and history. Web resources for assistive technology for home learning are also included for students with reading disabilities.
This guide includes tips for caregivers and educators who are helping students get started with speech-to-text software. It also includes sample word and sentence prompts, examples of dictation practice activities, and printable cue cards.
Learn about different writing prompts, the five components of a writing prompt, and the writing skills to be taught in order for students to respond to prompts of different genres.
This infographic provides a brief summary of what to look for in a scope and sequence for literacy instruction to gain a basic understanding of whether a curriculum provides instruction in a thorough and systematic way.
This guide developed by Iowa Reading Research Center Director Dr. Deborah K. Reed includes over 20 recommended books with summaries, difficulty level and interest level ratings, instructional information, sources of information related to the book, and more.
Young Adult Literature Guide - For Books Published 1974-2003
Responding to these fall-themed creative fiction and nonfiction writing prompts can help children and teens keep their literacy skills sharp. Each set includes 10 total prompts that encourage responders to draw from Common Core ELA Writing Standards skills. Tips for including reflection and providing teacher or caregiver feedback are also included.
Grades K-2 Fall Writing Prompts
Grades 3-5 Fall Writing Prompts
Grades 6-8 Fall Writing Prompts
Grades 9-12 Fall Writing Prompts
Grades K-2 Fall Writing Prompts
Grades 3-5 Fall Writing Prompts
Responding to these fall-themed creative fiction and nonfiction writing prompts can help children and teens keep their literacy skills sharp. Each set includes 10 total prompts that encourage responders to draw from Common Core ELA Writing Standards skills. Tips for including reflection and providing teacher or caregiver feedback are also included.
Grades K-2 Spring Writing Prompts
Grades 3-5 Spring Writing Prompts
Grades 6-8 Spring Writing Prompts
Grades 9-12 Spring Writing Prompts
Grades K-2 Spring Writing Prompts
Grades 3-5 Spring Writing Prompts
Responding to these summer-themed creative fiction and nonfiction writing prompts can help children and teens keep their literacy skills sharp. Each set includes 10 total prompts that encourage responders to draw from Common Core ELA Writing Standards skills. Tips for including reflection and providing teacher or caregiver feedback are also included.
Grades K-2 Summer Writing Prompts
Grades 3-5 Summer Writing Prompts
Grades 6-8 Summer Writing Prompts
Grades 9-12 Summer Writing Prompts
Grades K-2 Summer Writing Prompts
Grades 3-5 Summer Writing Prompts
Responding to these winter-themed creative fiction and nonfiction writing prompts can help children and teens keep their literacy skills sharp. Each set includes 10 total prompts that encourage responders to draw from Common Core ELA Writing Standards skills. Tips for including reflection and providing teacher or caregiver feedback are also included.
Grades K-2 Winter Writing Prompts
Grades 3-5 Winter Writing Prompts
Grades 6-8 Winter Writing Prompts
Grades 9-12 Winter Writing Prompts
Grades K-2 Winter Writing Prompts
Grades 3-5 Winter Writing Prompts
Use this chore chart template to fill out a weekly list of chores to be done, indicating which family member will do each chore and what day they will complete each chore. Discuss with the family as you go to practice English skills.
This guide provides sentence starters for students in fourth grade and older to formulate thoughts and opinions about a book which they can convey verbally for a book recommendation video. Filming tips for teachers are also provided. Videos can be posted for friends to see. Videos like these can be a way to motivate students to read and create something meaningful and useful.
Players describe nouns so that other players can guess them. This game provides practice using paraphrasing strategies, which are helpful when a speaker is struggling to use an unknown word.
Teach students how to recognize sight words, which helps students read effortlessly and focus on decoding difficult words, using this exercise that involves multiple rounds of instruction and practice.
This handout for practicing reading and spelling words with consonant digraphs contains pictures and partially spelled words that contain either the ch or sh digraph. Students will fill in the blank with the correct digraph to complete the spelling for the word that names what is shown in the picture above it.
Players match nouns and adjectives to expand their vocabulary and practice other literacy skills including morpheme awareness, making connections to background knowledge, and social connections. Directions for how to play the game and templates to make your own cards are included.
These scripts can be used for reader's theatre, which is an interpretive performance of a dramatic piece. The scripts include roles for 6–8 readers and lists of potentially unfamiliar vocabulary words. Some scripts also feature a list of idiomatic or colloquial expressions used within the piece, which teachers and caregivers can pre-teach, especially for bilingual students.
Reader's theatre can be used to teach and practice reading fluency. Read our blog post on reader's theatre for more information.
These plans use a famous speech (middle school) and a children's book on frogs (elementary school) as texts and t-chart graphic and semantic web graphic organizers to teach background knowledge. Related blog post.
Activating Background Knowledge Middle School Example Lesson Plan
Activating Background Knowledge Elementary School Example Lesson Plan
These plans provide guided and independent practice on adding details to expand simple sentences. Each plan contains a notes page, a words and phrases bank, and a practice sheet. Related blog post.
Students can use the three-part checklist to ensure that their argumentative claim is a strong foundation for the rest of their argumentative essay.
An introductory guide about using correct writing sequences (CWS) and incorrect writing sequences (IWS) as measures of student writing.
Cards that can be printed and used as part of a lesson teaching students to read, say, and spell words that have consonant digraphs. These cards feature the consonant digraphs ch and sh.
An example of a fidelity rubric that addresses both structural and procedural fidelity at the global and lesson-specific levels. Note that this example rubric is not intended to be used as an actual fidelity rubric because it does not correspond with a specific intervention.
A scripted representation of an educator modeling text structure mapping for a problem-solution text. Teaching text structure may improve comprehension.
Example Scripted Think Aloud for Text Structure Mapping Instruction
Teachers can use this graph to record writing goals and progress toward those goals with their students. A partially completed graph is also included to demonstrate how teachers and students can use the tool.
Guide your thinking, organize your decisions, and create active practice activities related to explicit vocabulary instruction. This resource is divided into the five major aspects of explicit vocabulary instruction and includes guiding questions to ground your planning in evidence-based practices.
Students can use this checklist to classify and generate higher-order questions about a text. These types of questions require analyzing or evaluating the text or creating something new.
Students may use this anchor chart to formulate questions about important elements of literary texts.
Students can use this checklist to make sure they are properly following all the components of the keyword mnemonics strategy in order to remember the definition of the target vocabulary word.
A supplemental resource from the Early Literacy Blueprint Initiative, teachers can use this questionnaire to plan appropriate instruction for English learners by gathering information about the student's linguistic background, the language(s) used in the home, and the literacy practices of the family.
Students working in pairs learn to follow a four-step procedure for correcting any errors made during oral reading fluency practice sessions.
Students choose from reading strategies and positive behaviors to set goals for improving their oral reading fluency during a Repeated Reading session.
This guide provides traits/skills of fluent readers and questions to help students identify their own strengths, weaknesses, and things to improve on in the future.
This rubric provides guidelines for providing students with targeted feedback regarding the accuracy and completion of their text maps (see Problem-Solution Text Structure Map). This can be used as part of text structure instruction, which may improve comprehension.
A guide to use when teaching students the Question-Answer Relationship (QAR) strategy to help teachers plan which questions to ask for the four question types and an answer that might be given.
Gain insight about your students and their reading interests by having them fill out this survey. Use the information gathered to select culturally relevant texts that students will find interesting and important.
Teachers can use this log to gain insight on whether or not a particular text was culturally relevant to their students. It includes yes-or-no questions and can be filled out each time students read a new text. Teachers can then use the insights gained to make decisions on whether or not to select other similar texts.
This anchor chart (Vanderbilt University Teaching Center, 2016) illustrates and describes the levels of the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy (Anderson & Kratwohl, 2010). Both students and teachers can use this resource.
This plan introduces picture-word prompts for practicing writing fluency and modeling how to use them for one-on-one and small-group instruction. Also includes providing students with feedback and progress monitoring. Related blog post.
Three ways to support struggling writers through sentence framing, expanding, and combining.
This anchor chart provides examples of students’ responses when asked to consider how they will use question generation inside and outside of the classroom.
This organizer helps readers develop comprehension skills by learning how to ask questions and look for the answers in a text.
Asking Questions of Readers in the Lower Grades (Pre-Kindergarten-Fourth Grade) graphic organizer
This organizer helps readers develop comprehension skills by learning how to ask questions and look for the answers in a text.
"Asking Questions of Readers in the Upper Grades (Fifth Grade and Up)" graphic organizer
This graphic organizer helps children organize their thoughts about the similarities and differences between a book and a movie telling the same story. Comparing books and their movie adaptations can help motivate students to read and dig deeper into some elements of the text.
Students can be taught to use this graphic organizer to identify and record events that occur in a text (effect) and the reason why that event occurred (cause).
With this graphic organizer, children can identify and define the two words that were combined to make a compound word and use that information to define the compound word. This can help develop morphological knowledge, or the ability to identify and manipulate the smallest units of meaning within a word.
Students can identify and keep track of context clues using this graphic organizer by writing down the unfamiliar word, the type of context clue, and the word meaning. Context clues help readers determine the meaning of new words.
This tool helps users organize their thoughts and learn to form opinions about their reading.
Questions about a mentor text guide discussion, help students organize their thoughts, and identify techniques and approaches from the example of good writing that students can use. The organizer can be used in a group or individual setting.
This chart can be filled out by children when reading at home in order to support activation of background knowledge about the topic of a text they are reading. This is intended to help them better understand the text.
This graphic organizer helps students write down evidence they find in a text, make a prediction based on that evidence, write down any new evidence they find, and evaluate the prediction they made. Making predictions is a way for students to better comprehend a given text.
Using two prompts, users will be able to use this organizer to practice inferencing skills, which are critical for reading comprehension.
A graphic organizer to help students display and organize important features from a text about a problem and solution. The graphic organizer can be used to teach text structure, which may improve comprehension.
Children can use this graphic organizer for recording the characters, settings, and events of a story. This graphic organizer can be used to help your child identify the elements while reading or listening to a story.
Students can be taught to use this graphic organizer as a part of a comprehension strategy to show the elements of a narrative text and check themselves for understanding of those elements.
A graphic organizer to record the meaning of suffixes in words by writing down the word ending, whether the word is an adjective or a noun, and the meaning of the suffix.
Adolescents can use this resource to identify themes in literary texts and record textual details that introduce and develop the themes.
Users of this tool are encouraged to write down their thoughts about a text in four different ways (opinion, reaction, connection, and visualization) and provide reasons from the text for their thoughts.
A graphic organizer designed to help students determine which letters represent the sounds heard in a given word. A graphic representing the word is provided with blank spaces for each sound to be filled in. Both a three-space and six-space word box are included.
With this resource that includes a graphic organizer, children follow a step-by-step set of instructions that leads them to write an objective summary of a text. The summary does not include any opinions or judgments.
CROWD is used to remember the types of basic questions to ask to facilitate dialogic reading: completion, recall, open-ended, “wh” questions, and distancing.
The IDEA strategy uses four key components drawn from research that caregivers can easily implement to teach and practice literacy skills when reading to children at home.
This guide can be put in every book at home or in the classroom library to help plan new vocabulary and questions you want to include when reading with children in order to facilitate dialogic reading.
PEER questions are meant to encourage deeper responses about a text during dialogic reading, leading to a conversation beyond one-word answers.
This guide provides an overall orientation to Colorin Colorado, a national multimedia project offering a wealth of bilingual, research-based information, activities, and advice for educators and families of English language learners.
"Fun and Effective Ways to Read to Children" facilitation guide
This guide explores a collection of searchable digital books available in multiple languages.
"International Children's Digital Library" facilitation guide
This facilitation guide features Reading Rockets, a website that provides family members tips for helping kids become successful readers. Information can be searched by age or grade, disability area, and home language.
This facilitation guide focuses on a section of the Colorin Colorado and Reading Rockets websites that offer at-home activities family members can use to help their children understand the sounds in words.
"Tips for Teaching Your Child About Phonemes" facilitation guide
The Iowa Department of Education provides letter templates and other documents to assist with implementation of the state’s early literacy laws. The letters are intended to assist schools in communicating with families about universal screening assessments and results.
The documents begin on Page 23 of the “Early Literacy Technical Assistance Appendices.”
Family members provide answers about the educational experiences of their child with a learning disability. The insights provided can be used during an Individualized Education Program meeting and documented in the Individualized Education Program.
This checklist outlines the steps family members can take when they have concerns regarding their child’s reading performance.
By Shawn Datchuk, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, University of Iowa College of Education
This white paper explains how handwriting assessments can be used to analyze a student’s handwriting and then offers instructional techniques to improve the handwriting of elementary-aged students.
By Renita Schmidt, Ph.D.,
Associate Professor (retired), University of Iowa College of Education
Amanda Haertling Thein, Ph.D.,
Associate Professor, University of Iowa College of Education
The authors explain how they go about selecting texts for their afterschool reading club that helps girls grow into strong women through reading books featuring strong female protagonists. They also highlight key practices they have found useful in reading and responding to those texts.
By Gwen Marra, Ed.D.
Through read alouds that utilize dialogic reading, children can develop their use of new vocabulary in a meaningful way, make connections between new and previously-learned information, and learn literary elements like character, point of view, and plot.
The Power of Interactive Read Alouds
Related: Blank version of the Dialogic Reading Planning Form included in the report