New Year, New Goals!

New year, new goals, yes? People frequently establish a variety of goals when we start a new year, including ones related to their education, finances, self-care, fitness, and more. How is your child doing with reading? For those, too, you can create goals! Setting personal reading objectives gives pupils a focus for their reading and establishes the reading's purpose. It provides you with instructional direction for what to work on during your one-on-one reading sessions as a parent or tutor. Students have essentially formed a vision and a roadmap for their future learning when they have a reading goal they are striving toward. Setting reading objectives helps inspire and encourage pupils to improve their reading skills all year long.

Reading goals aren’t required to be long term or yearly, they can be simple and short. These goals can be set with a weekly or monthly time frame. Now, why should we set reading goals? 

Benefits of reading goals 

• Goals, reading or otherwise are meant to motivate us. Reading goals help to motivate and inspire the reader. Children are usually more enthusiastic about reading when they feel motivated and inspired. 

• It allows you to highlight a specific reading skill and work on it. For example, if this week’s reading goal is to master the current decodable text, the reading sessions during this week would focus on working towards achieving that goal and mastering the text. Having this goal set, allowed both parent/tutor and reader to zoom in and focus on completing and mastering the decodable text vs if no goals were set prior and the week was spent reading a variety of texts including the decodable text but not mastering any by the end of the week. 

• By setting reading goals, you can track the reader’s progress as they improve. Being able to track one’s progress can serve as motivation as well as a guide for planning future goals and sessions. 

Setting goals boosts engagement and output. We're more likely to be driven to achieve when we are clear about what we want to accomplish (Pink, 2009). Reading instruction is no different. Setting goals makes both teachers and students accountable. When reading goals are set in collaboration with instructors, reinforced throughout time, and based on reliable assessments, students are more likely to be motivated to read. Consider the sense of success they'll have after achieving each goal and how much this feeling will motivate them to put in more effort to improve as readers and achieve future reading objectives.

At The Caribbean Academy for Reading Intervention and Development, we offer an Individual Reading Assistance Program that assists struggling readers to build skills in: 

• Sight words and high-frequency words 

• Sounds recognition 

• Reading comprehension 

• Letter and word recognition 

• Phonics and phonemic awareness 

Our Reading Assistance Programme is designed to teach the foundational skills of reading to children with significant academic challenges, empowering them to achieve grade-level proficiency. Our dedicated tutors help struggling readers understand the basic mechanics of reading and help them develop critical reading skills that will help them develop a lifelong love of reading. 

Target Audience: Struggling readers between the ages of 5 years to 10 years. 

Persons interested in our Individual Reading Assistance Program can contact us at 1-868-474-9819. 

Chrystal Murray has a passion for imparting knowledge and adding value to the lives of others.

She has been an educator for over 14 years. She holds a B.A. Degree in History and Education from the University of the West Indies (UWI). She also possesses several professional certificates in Understanding Dyslexia, Successful Educational Strategies for Children with Special Needs, and Supporting Multiple Abilities through Differentiation just to name a few. She is also certified in Counselling Youth and Children and Parenting the Adolescent. Chrystal is the Founder and Principal of two academic institutions, the Caribbean Ivy League Academy and the Caribbean Academy for Reading Intervention and Development. She founded the Caribbean Academy for Reading Intervention and Development where she works assiduously with children who have reading challenges. She also uses this platform to motivate, inspire and help build confidence in the children who are in her care.

 

 

Chrystal Murray 

Reading Interventionist 

1-868-474-9819