Read aloud to your students often while they follow in their own copy of the text. Do this to familiarize your students with sentence structure, develop vocabulary and to exemplify a good reading model.
Practice shared guided reading, where each student has an opportunity to read a section of a text. Do this to identify which students are natural readers and which need a high level of explicit instruction.
Assist students during guided readings with phonetic instruction when appropriate. Sound words out to help students who require a higher level of instruction understand letter sounds. Combining phonetic instructions with guided reading allows students to develop a great sense of the relationship between appearance and sounds of words.
Teach reading and writing simultaneously to allow students to use language in as many ways as possible. Teaching all concepts of language simultaneously is much more beneficial than teaching each element in isolation, according to research at earlyliterature.ecsd.net.
Encourage students to write and read their own stories aloud to the classroom. Participate in this exercise as well to reinforce a good writing and reading model. It is important to continue to read to and with students even after they have already learned to read themselves.
Develop creative and diverse reading assignments to change the pace of the class often and to expose students to as much text as possible.