Reading Universe Site Tour Links

Welcome to Reading Universe!

If you attended a virtual tour of Reading Universe and are looking for a list of featured resources, you’re on the right page! Here is the list of authoritative resources we told you about — including the taxonomy, printable lesson planning materials, and outstanding in-classroom videos featuring highly-skilled teachers and researchers from around the United States. 

We invite you to use this page of links to conduct your own tour of the site! Copy and paste some or all of these resources to use with your students and share with teachers in your school community.

1. Let's Start with the Taxonomy!

Here's a Demo

Watch the video or open the taxonomy in a new window and give it a try! Be sure to expand the full taxonomy to get a view of all of the skills and see how they are connected. 

Hide Video Transcript Show Video Transcript

[Music] If you teach reading, you know how rewarding it can be. But you've probably also found that in every class there will be students who really struggle with learning to read.

Reading Universe is here to help. With expert guidance we've developed a new framework to support educators everywhere. It's called the Reading Universe Taxonomy.

How does this free professional resource work? It's built upon the leading research on how we learn to read. We are born with the ability to learn oral language, but making sense of the written word doesn't come naturally; so we need to teach students that the letters on a page represent the sounds we all use to speak with each other.

The path to literacy is through word recognition. Children need to crack the alphabetic code using phonological awareness and phonics. They need to be able to hear that a spoken word like net is made up of separate sounds: /n/, /e/, /t/. That's phonological awareness. And they need to connect those sounds to the letters of the alphabet to see 'n', 'e', 't' and read net. That's phonics.

But being able to read words is just one part of the process. Students also need to understand what the words mean. That's called language comprehension. As children gain more knowledge of the world around them, they begin to recognize more of the words that they sound out. Then they can build on their knowledge through more reading. Only students who develop word recognition and language comprehension can achieve reading comprehension. It takes both to become a good reader.

Inside the Reading Universe Taxonomy you'll find everything you need to know about how to teach the reading skills your students need to master. Each literacy component is broken down into its many skills and processes. For each skill we show why it matters and how to teach it effectively, and we offer ideas for supporting students who need extra help. We don't just describe effective teaching, we show it with in-classroom video filmed in schools around the country.

Ongoing assessment is critical to effective teaching, so we provide guidance for determining what each student needs and how to tailor your instruction to meet those needs. Reading comprehension is not just one skill. It's the product of all the many skills that we teach our children.

We hope the Reading Universe Taxonomy will become your trusted go-to guide and that, together, we can give more children the chance to excel as readers and in their lives. This is Reading Universe.

2. Explore Example Skill Explainers

Under each section of the taxonomy, we offer "skill explainers" for all of the skills your students will need to learn. Each skill explainer has a detailed description of how to teach each skill, along with lesson plans, decodable texts, practice activities, videos, and assessments. Here are links to a few of our favorites.

Consonant Digraphs Skill Explainer

• Model Video: Teaching the Digraph ‘th’
• How to Pronounce the /TH/ Voiced Sound Interactive
• How to Pronounce the /th/ Unvoiced Sound Interactive
• Phonics Lesson Daily Checklist
• Consonant Digraphs: List of Words, Phrases, and Sentences for Lesson Planning
• Digraphs Flash Cards with Pictures
• Digraphs Flash Cards without Pictures
• Lesson Plan for Digraph ‘th’ (see all of our Digraph Lesson Plans)
• Decodable Text: The Posh Ship
• Elkonin Boxes for Digraph ‘th’

Consonant -le Skill Explainer

• Prepare to Teach Consonant ‘-le’  with flash cards, word lists, and dictation lessons.
• Student Practice Activities give students opportunities to practice reading and spelling words with consonant '-le' syllables, building accuracy and automaticity for fluent reading.

Grammatical Building Blocks Skill Explainer

• Grammar in Action: Sentence Function Questions Cards

Sentence Combining - a sneak peak at new skill explainer that’s coming soon!

• Model Video: Writing Stronger Sentences

3. Continuums and Checklists to Guide Instruction

The following two documents, which are part of every skill explainer, provide guidance on how to organize and deliver your reading instruction so that students get all the skills they need in an efficient timeframe — and without any gaps. 

Word Recognition Continuum 
Use this scope and sequence to know when to teach each skill.

Phonics Lesson Daily Checklist
Use this routine to make the most of your 30-minute phonics block.

4. Collection Pages

Here is a sampling of the ready-to-use printable materials that you can freely print from our site and start using in your phonics lessons today. 

Decodables
Find decodable texts for every single phonics skill! Match a decodable text with the spelling pattern you’re teaching. And if you're just getting started, be sure to check out our How to Use Decodable Texts article.

Flash Cards
Flash cards for sound-letter correspondence are the heart of phonics! Reading Universe offers a free collection of 30+ flash cards organized by skill.

Lesson Plans
Reading Universe has over 90 structured literacy lesson plans organized by phonics skill to help you establish strong routines, so you can focus on explicitly teaching the content.

Assessments
Our collection of 40+ assessments serve as a quick "check in" to see if students understand a skill and if your instruction is effective before moving on. 

5. Reading Research and Teacher Learning

The Big Picture section of our site is written for classroom teachers like you. As you know, the research supporting evidence-based instruction goes back 50 years. These two example articles will help you (and the teachers you work with!) get your heads around this important body of work.

• 10 Maxims of Reading Reserach
• The Simple View of Reading and Scarborough's Rope

Courses and Trainings

If you are intersted in taking an online course or leading professional development in your school, you'll want to check out our free training resources and opportunities. Here are two examples to give you an idea of what we offer — and we’re building even more!

• ParaReading: A Five-Course Series for Paraprofessionals

  Explore Our ParaReading Courses

• PLC Toolkit: Teaching English Learners How to Read

  View the Toolkit

Timely Talks

In these in-depth lecture videos, nationally renowned reading experts discuss critical topics related to reading instruction, including what the cognitive science says and how to value students’ home languages in the classroom.

 

Thank you for joining our tour! We hope this list of links helps you find your pathway to all the free high-quality resources on our site. 
If you have questions or comments, please reach out to us: [email protected]. We’ll keep you posted on new content every month with our newsletter. Sign up today!