that we have not yet found the right way to teach them (Reading Recovery in North America, 2000). It is through this principle that Marie Clay developed Reading Recovery, an early intervention program to help low-achieving six year olds learn to read (Thomas, 1992). It was first implemented in five Auckland schools in 1978. The program then expanded to 48 Auckland schools by the end of the first year. With strong success, the program was implemented across New Zealand in the 80’s. By 1990, it had spread to Australia, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom (Reading Recovery in North America, 2000). Reading Recovery is used as a supplement to good classroom teaching. Individual students receive a half-hour lesson each school day for 12 to 20 weeks with a trained Reading Recovery teacher. As soon as students can read within the average range of their class and demonstrate that they can continue to achieve, their lessons are discontinued, and new students begin individual instruction. Using Clay’s An Observational Survey of Early Literacy Achievement, the teacher can assess each child’s strengths and confusions. The teacher continues to assess the child’s progress each day with a running record and uses the data to plan future lessons. Each lesson consists of reading familiar stories, reading a story that was read for the first time the day before, working with letters and words using magnetic letters, writing a story, assembling a cut-up story, and reading a new book. Problem-solving strategies are taught and demonstrated to help encourage comprehension and decoding for reading fluency. Letter-sound relationships are also incorporated into the lessons. Running Records are used to determine what information the child is using to decode the words in reading. They are analyzed for meaning, structure, and visual information. Teachers focus on each student’s strengths to learn strategies ...
