The Hi-Lo Road to Reading Fluency
I’ve never met a musician who didn’t start out with one simple chord…and I’ve never met a bibliophile who didn’t read as a kid. Practice is so important to everything we do in life – but struggling readers – especially beyond elementary school – probably don’t have a lot of experience with reading. Historically, it’s been a challenge for them, and so it’s become something they are good at circumventing.
Showing these students the Hi-Lo road will help to foster a love of reading and teach those skills that are necessary for even the most basic of careers. It provides students with a sense of empowerment and confidence as they tackle the challenge of becoming a better reader!
What’s Missing Here?
Just by reading the back of a book, knowing the title, seeing the cover, flipping through illustrations, or skimming the first few pages, you are probably able to tell what’s going to happen in a novel, right? This is predicting, and it’s a critical first step. Unless you can predict what might happen, and then check to see if it meets your expectations, you are not invested in the text.
Likewise, summarizing is a task that will keep you invested in the text. Checking in with your students every so often to be sure that they understand what is happening will help to keep them on track. This can be a difficult task for many struggling learners. So ask leading questions to help them remember details.
In addition to predicting and summarizing, making inferences is a necessary skill, yet one that requires the development of abstract thought. This is your ‘reading between the lines’ skill – the one that takes in body language, emotions, surrounding circumstances, and couples them with the action to figure out motivation and untold backstory. This is also where the majority of confusion comes in for struggling readers. The amount of inferring needed is what separates the basic from difficult texts at the upper grades level.
Typical middle and high school texts assume that the student has already mastered some, or all, of these skills, making them even more difficult to read than elementary texts. By taking the Hi-Lo approach, students can read material that engages them, but through books that are still providing many of the concrete details (little to no inference needed).
So What’s a Mom to Do?
A high-interest, low-level book (Hi-Lo book) is a chapter book of easier readability, but with characters that are older. Also, the topics tend to be geared more toward teens and even adults. (This is what’s used in adult-literacy programs.) While there are many fantastic Hi-Lo reading choices for the elementary level – such as High Noon Books – few exist for high school…and what options do exist for these upper grades are financially-prohibitive for most homeschool families.
Given how few options there are for struggling readers in the upper grades, Homeschool On the Range is taking books that fit into the “Hi-Lo” role and using them to expand the reading level slowly. They’re teaching history, geography, and science through an engaging story that holds students’ interest. For example, the battle-themed books in the We Were There series
Free Reading Resources
All of the adapted Hi-Lo units are free and accessible for teachers and homeschooling families. They begin with a book, include some background / introductory material, and have hands-on activities, video clips, critical thinking questions, and writing activities. You can access them – as well as see what’s upcoming – on the Novel Studies page.
View the full Summer Reading series here!
About the Author
Yvie practices the art of simple living with her chickens, goats, dogs, rabbits, and house full of boys in rural America. She loves acoustic guitar, historic novels, and anything with dark chocolate! You can find her at Homeschool On the Range, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, or YouTube.
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