Reading Intervention Highlight: Read Naturally Live

Do you have struggling readers in your class? Do you want to create an individualized, differentiated reading curriculum that addresses each student at their reading and comprehension level?

What is Read Live?

The strategy of Read Live is “structured intervention programs combine teacher modeling, repeated reading, and progress monitoring — three strategies that research has shown are effective in improving students'  reading proficiency.” (Read Live) This program supports the National Reading Panel’s five essential components of reading (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension). 

How It Works

The basic principle behind Read Naturally is teacher modeling, repeated reading, and progress monitoring.

Teacher Modeling

An aspect of Read live is that students reads along with the recording of a fluent reader. This helps model for students proper pronunciation, expression, and phrasing.

Repeated Reading

This strategy has been shown to improve fluency so in Read Live students re-read text until they reach a predetermined goal rate. This allows students gain confidence and ultimately master the story before moving on. 

Progress Monitoring

Students become engaged and active within the learning process through daily monitoring in the Read Live program. Students can see in graphs the increase in words correctly read through the process of practicing then re-reading. 

How much does it cost?

Read live cost $149 per student for a 12 month subscription. The cost go down per user the more seats purchased. For instance a 30 seat subscription goes down to $15.38 a student ($1999.00 total). With your 12 month subscription, you also have the following services:

Pros: 

• Lower implementation Costs: Read Live only requires a web browser with Adobe Flash support which means no hardware or software is required to set up, install, maintain or update. 
• Pricing: One price for access to all 13 Sequenced Series Levels and all 6 Phonics Series Levels. The price also decreases when purchasing more than 6 seats so it's an efficient use of funds for struggling readers. 
• Assessment tool included: For each seat purchased, 30 seats of Benchmark Assessor Live is included. This means that for the price of enrolling one student, you can screen an entire class of  30 students. 
• Teacher Management: It has a easy to use teacher management system that can adjust student reading levels, analyze and graph various components of reading, etc. to share with teachers, parents, and administrators. 

Cons: 

• Student's can become frustrated with re-reading text and some students will read faster just to reach their goals (which can influence fluency and expression). With teacher- supervision these can be avoided. 

In summary, for struggling reader Read Live is a helpful interactive program that an be adjusted specifically to the student. This program is also great to improve confidence in reading and comprehension, broadens vocabulary and monitors progress. This program gives insightful information on students to share with teachers, administrators, parents and the student on their reading, fluency and comprehension. It also offers tiered, individualized learning based on the students level.

If your interested Read Live offers a free 60 day trial:  http://www.readnaturally.com/products/readlivetrial.htm#trial

For a video tutorial on Read Live check out: http://www.readnaturally.com/howto/videos_readlive.htm.