​With spring starting and the end of the school year on the horizon, many students’ focus may be less consistent.  In our minds there is still over a month to go and plenty that can be accomplished, so what are ways that we can continue to hold students’ interest?  See below for some suggested ways to keep your student engaged through the end of the year.  Our staff use these regularly and we’ve found them successful, so we wanted to pass them along to you!

If you’re planning to run a marathon, chances are you wouldn’t run all 26.2 miles all at once on the first try. The logical way to get there is to start small, and build up miles little by little over weeks or months. With enough time and practice, your legs will be strong enough to carry you all the way.

Did you know that readers need to build stamina too? As in physical fitness, time and practice are important factors in building strong readers. At Teton Literacy, we start building stamina even in our youngest Literacy Lab pre-K students. Though they are still developing pre-reading skills and aren’t reading chapter books per se, throughout the year we work on focusing on a task for greater and greater amounts of time that will help them with their reading stamina later on. Already our progress is astounding: now in April, we can spend about twice as long, painting, creating with playdoh, drawing, building with blocks, and engaging in complex make believe play than we could in the beginning of the year. We know that in pre-K, being able to engage in play and other tasks for sustained periods will contribute to a successful transition to Kindergarten, which can jump-start reading success.
Do you have an older student who is working on reading stamina? Try these tips adapted from Colorin Colorado to continue

1. Mix it up: try reading to someone else or listening to someone read instead of just reading to yourself. It all counts as reading time!
2. Make sure what you’re reading is “just right.” That means it’s not too hard and not too easy.
3. Celebrate progress! Take joy in the fact that you’re reading, not just in the amount of minutes you’ve read. In the end, that’s what it’s all about.