Shaping Literacy Success: 6 Strategies for the classroom

Shaping Literacy Success: 6 Strategies for Classroom Reading Improvement

March 23, 2025

How to embellish your classroom and inspire a love of words, reading, and learning. Here are 6 guided strategies on how you can enrich your classroom and motivate your students to enjoy literacy.

1) Cultivate an environment where literacy is deeply valued

Get to know your students, including their interests (very important!), family backgrounds, community ties, sport/cultural interests.

Embrace the idea that every child is a reader and support and celebrate each student’s journey. Use a sport analogy: develop their reading muscles and increase reading stamina. Let them know you believe in them.

Demonstrate the value of books by sharing ideas and collaborating to make meaning together.

Words, words, words! Emphasise the importance of words by making vocabulary learning engaging and dynamic. Introduce a new word each week, and recognise those who use these words in creative, fresh ways. It’s an impossible to teach every work, but you can foster an awareness of language and its richness.

2) Explicitly teach skills

There’s robust evidence for using explicit instruction when teaching new content, but also for catching up students where they might be struggling.

Phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency are foundations for proficiency. Older students benefit from learning structural analysis, such as common prefixes and suffixes and rules for dividing longer words into syllables. All these are essential to reading and understanding.

The ultimate endgame is to apply these skills to meaningful texts. Fundamental skills provide the foundation, yet they serve as stepping stones toward cultivating readers who are not only engaged but also skilled critical thinkers.

Create small reading groups, organised according to students’ needs, to support the development of skills and strategies to increase student competency. Meet several times a week, using books and materials that are at the students’ instructional level—meaning the text is a bit too difficult for reading independently, but just right with the support of a teacher. We see this modelled in many classrooms and dedicated teacher-aides are worth their weight in gold (& a bit extra!).

3) Build an Engaging Classroom Library

Curate a diverse collection of books and materials that align with your students’ interests and reading abilities. Position your classroom library in a visible, accessible space to encourage engagement.

Empower students to select books they genuinely want to read—both during independent reading time and at home.

Organise books by genre, topic, or author to guide students toward choices that match their interests. While leveling books can be helpful, avoid restricting students to specific levels, as motivation, life experience, and curiosity often influence reading success. Ensure students understand how the library is structured.

Teach students how to choose books that match both their interests and reading comfort level. Encourage them to start by examining the cover, scanning the layout, and looking at illustrations. If a book seems appealing, they can check readability by sampling a page or two. A useful guideline is aiming for about 95% reading accuracy for students below year four and 97% accuracy for those in year four and above.

Read our article for setting up a classroom library.

4) Meet with learners individually during independent reading time.

This can be a challenge to fit in, however, listening to a student read can provide you with valuable information. Pay attention to patterns in word identification and fluency skills such as breaking words into syllables, phrasing, vocabulary knowledge and comprehension. When I listen to students read, I often witness their lack of awareness of punctuation, which in turn, effects their comprehension.

Individual reading conferencing can provide excellent formative assessment data, so keep track of each learner’s development as a reader. These notes are useful when planning lessons and worth sharing with parents at parent-student-teacher interviews

5) Book Talk

Teacher-led book talks can really spark student interest in reading. Make them brief. Highlight a book that you think your learners will enjoy. You might showcase an eye-catching illustration or read a short passage to demonstrate the author’s creative use of language. Put the book on display and watch it vanish!

Pair Books with Instagram-Famous Authors, Sportspeople, or Motivational Celebrities

Many teens are drawn to influencers, athletes, and motivational figures they admire. Leverage this by connecting books with well-known personalities. For instance:

Athlete Autobiographies – Sports fans might love books by figures like Ash Barty, Usain Bolt, or LeBron James.
Motivational Reads – Teens interested in personal development may enjoy books by influencers like Jay Shetty or Dr. Julie Smith.
Trending Fiction – If a celebrity posts about a book on social media, highlight it at school to capitalise on the hype.
Australian Inspirational Athletes who inspire mental toughness and resilience – I have read books from the following : Nedd Brockmann (Showing Up) , Bonnie Hancock (The Girl who Touched the Stars) and Emma Carey (The Girl Who Fell from the Sky) and can testify to their honest reflections and overcoming adversity.

(My tip for high schools has been that Nedd Brockmann produces his own choccie milk and sports socks – this may be the reward for teens engaging with his book.)

6) Offer engaging reading comprehension texts

This is the driving force behind our passion to re-engage students with reading. Students of all reading abilities are turning away from books (for many reasons). As a teacher, I was frustrated at the lack of good quality, reading resources that really appealed to the students in my class. Once I started curating my own comprehension resources, reading levels improved. Students WILL read if you provide content on themes that appeal – social justice, sport, animals, history, extreme sports, climate – and then this fosters discussion between classmates about what they learned.

To sum up, as a teacher (or homeschooling parent) what are you reading? Share your books, magazines, editorials, and journals in class. Share your favourite websites, podcast, and audiobooks. Demonstrate that you are a lifelong reader, writer, and listener. Tell students what you like most about what you’re currently reading or listening to. What is your favourite time to read, write, or listen; how does reading and writing help you, relax you, provide enjoyment, and make a positive impact on your life?

Literacy for Boys and Literacy for Kids recognizes the many benefits of early reading. Our resources and programs are helping kids all over Australia learn to improve their literacy skills!