Many wordless books use a repeated pattern or a rhyme. No one was there. A second grade teacher in a rural Appalachian school supplements the required basal readings with familiar regional literature to teach reading to her students. The children also write their own regional stories. A well stocked reading corner in the classroom gives children the opportunity to read a book more than once along with the option of sometimes reading a book with no academic follow-up activities.
Teachers can develop checklists to fill out as they listen to children read.
Teachers should become continuous observers who monitor the child's interaction with materials in the child's educational environment. Most parents will accept a teacher's observation that a child is making progress in reading, even without the reinforcement of test results. When children in basal-dominated programs reach the 4th grade, they often confront reading for the first time as a task that goes beyond the oral language background that has served them through the lower primary grades. Students are moved at this point into the literary tradition with vocabulary and content that outstrips what they know. They also come into contact with content area reading as science and social studies become individual disciplines separate from language arts.