5 Early Reading Intervention Activities for the Classroom

Throughout the past decade, teachers have felt increasing pressure to show early reading progress amid declining national literacy scores. The Nation’s Report Card recently revealed reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) dropped in both fourth and eighth grades, continuing declines first reported in 2019. 

Because every student has a unique set of strengths and weaknesses, teaching literacy in a way that works for each student can be difficult, especially when educators don’t have enough time or resources. Many students require early intervention as they work toward literacy. This support typically includes lessons about phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension—all key components found in curricula rooted in the science of reading. 

For many students, especially those with reading disabilities like dyslexia, explicit instruction in these early intervention activities is crucial. Developing a Structured Literacy approach that includes reading intervention strategies increases students’ reading success.

What Are Reading Intervention Activities?

While reading intervention typically refers to one-on-one or small-group instruction targeted toward specific students, there are also plenty of activities you can do in your classroom to help students of all levels strengthen their reading skills. 

One of the more popular forms of in-class reading activities is “round-robin” or “popcorn” reading, which half of K–8 teachers reported using in 2009, and many still use today. Michelle Lia, a clinical research professor at Loyola University Chicago, says round-robin reading or popcorn reading, which calls individual students to read a small portion of a text aloud to the class, is ineffective because only a few students get to read. Also, the teacher must lead the activity, clarifying, summarizing, and asking questions of students. Struggling readers might also feel uncomfortable or embarrassed to read out loud to the whole group. Despite their popularity, these exercises are ineffective in helping students with word comprehension, increased fluency, or word decoding. 

Instead of “round robin” reading techniques, we’ve compiled a list of various in-class activities that make learning to read fun and community-based. This post from Edutopia, “11 Alternatives to Round Robin (and Popcorn) Reading,” shares a bevy of classroom reading strategies, several of which we’ve highlighted here.

1. Choral Reading

In this activity, the teacher and students read aloud together, minimizing the anxiety of solo reading. Choral reading is a much-loved way to get the whole class reading along while also helping less-confident readers learn to recognize frequently used words in a more relaxed and community-based way.

In another version of this exercise, the teacher reads aloud and pauses on certain words, prompting the students to fill in the blanks together. This classroom reading strategy actively helps students with decoding and fluency.

2. Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS)

Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS) is a peer-tutoring activity in which students are divided into pairs, with each pair alternating between the tutor and the tutee. This exercise allows students to practice reading with their peers and improves their literacy, decoding, and comprehension skills. 

For this activity to work best, teachers should pair students based on their strengths and weaknesses. For example, one student might be great at pronunciation but struggle with comprehension, and their partner would fill in the gaps for them—and vice versa.

According to the What Works Clearinghouse, PALS was found to have potentially positive effects on reading fluency and reading comprehension.

3. Teacher Read-Aloud

When teachers read aloud with students following along in their own books, they emphasize intentional pauses, expressive reading, and word pronunciation. This activity allows students to develop their fluency and comprehension skills directly. Playing audiobooks in the classroom or at home also achieves similar results. Dr. Betsy Okello, a core team member of the Notre Dame Center for Literacy Education, says picking books rich in vocabulary that develop literacy skills such as rhyming and phonemic awareness can engage students and help them make sense of the text.

4. The Crazy Professor Reading Game

This game has four stages: 

• Stage 1: Students individually read aloud from their portion of the text, reading with as much verbal expression as possible.

• Stage 2: Students reread their section with the same amount of verbal expression as Stage 1, adding dramatic hand gestures as they read.

• Stage 3: Teach your neighbor. Students partner with someone who reads a different text from their own, taking turns describing their reading.

• Stage 4: The students pair up to play “crazy professor” and “eager student.” The “professor” gives a hyped-up overview of the text and asks the “student” questions about it.

This is a high-energy activity for the class that helps facilitate reading comprehension and critical thinking skills. For example, you can find videos of this reading comprehension game on YouTube.

5. Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction

Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction (FORI) asks students to read the same section of text during the week. This process is broken into five steps:

1. The teacher reads aloud in class while students follow along in their books.

2. Students echo read, repeating after the teacher.

3. Students choral read.

4. Students partner read, with each student taking turns reading aloud.

5. Finally, students can take the text home if more practice is needed, and teachers can integrate extension activities throughout the week.

Implementing Evidence-Based Reading Intervention Activities

Teaching young students how to read can be a complex process, considering each student has their own unique set of strengths and preferred learning styles. As you’re implementing these classroom reading strategies, it’s critical to keep the science of reading’s five pillars of literacy in mind:

• Phonemic awareness: The ability to identify the sounds that make up speech

• Phonics: The ability to match sounds to letters

• Vocabulary: The collection of words and meanings students must know to understand a new text 

• Fluency: The ability to read accurately and quickly

• Comprehension: Understanding the concept of what is read 

Before introducing supplemental reading games to the classroom, students must understand the concepts they are asked to practice. You can do this by introducing mini-lessons focused on science of reading literacy concepts and adjusting instruction for smaller groups based on individual needs.

Your literacy programs should also take an explicit, systematic approach to literacy instruction. Programs should be both evidence-based and adaptive to provide differentiated instruction for effective reading intervention.

Alongside instruction, students should also have the opportunity to explore reading independently. You can support independent reading in several ways, whether it’s allowing students to choose the books they read, organizing them in book clubs based on their reading abilities, or assigning creative book reports on a story of their choice.

Resources for Reading Intervention

Beyond classroom reading activities, programs that support each student’s unique instructional needs can further support reading acceleration. Look for resources that include:

• Evidence-based instruction 

• Explicit, systematic, and adaptive learning for effective scaffolding

• Personalized learning pathways 

• Embedded assessment and real-time data for educators 

• Teacher resources for one-on-one instruction

• Engaging, age-appropriate content 

• Alignment with state standards

Lexia® Core5® Reading, a research-proven program for students in grades pre-K–5, ensures each student gets the instruction they need while providing teachers with real-time data and actionable resources for one-on-one instruction. Core5 follows an Adaptive Blended Learning model that offers explicit, systematic, and personalized reading instruction. During the 2023–2024 school year, Core5 helped more than 3.7 million pre-K–5 students across 18,400 schools make substantial progress toward their reading goals. Seventy-nine percent of students using the program with fidelity reached grade-level benchmarks or above, according to research.

Lexia® PowerUp Literacy® is designed for adolescent students in grades 6–12 who need additional support on reading foundations. PowerUp is rooted in the science of reading and has proven to be up to five times as effective as the average middle school reading intervention. The program’s engaging grade-level texts motivate students and save educators time by identifying gaps in skill level. During the 2023–2024 school year, nearly 1 million students across 10,278 schools used PowerUp. When students used the program with fidelity, 51% of students covered three grade levels of skills in just one year. 

Why Early Reading Intervention Programs Matter

There is a great deal of evidence to support the idea that students who cannot read well by the time they are 8 or 9 years old—when the emphasis in school becomes reading to learn rather than learning to read—often struggle to catch up with their peers both academically and socially. 

Fortunately, research shows programs rooted in the science of reading can help teachers develop individualized pathways that allow all students to succeed. At Lexia®, we aim to make literacy a reality for every student. 

Discover how Lexia programs can provide effective reading intervention at any grade.