Fountas & Pinnell Blog

Whether you are an individual teacher or a member of a collaborative learning community, The Literacy Continuum can guide you during reflection, decision making, and planning.

Challenging books lift readers, and diverse books expand their life experiences and knowledge of their world.

Systematic assessment is very helpful because the more precise you are in your assessment, the more effective you will be in your teaching.

Within the social world of classrooms, students learn what it means to be a global citizen. Through books, learning extends beyond the classroom walls. They learn how to collaborate, how to learn, how to solve problems.

School shouldn't be a place where everything is leveled. It should resemble a library or a bookstore where books are categorized by author, by topic, by genre, anything that would interest readers. We want the readers not to see themselves as a level, but as people who are choosing books that interest them and that they want to read.

Learn about the essential tool for selecting texts and for understanding the reading behaviors to notice, teach for, and support.

Rather than simply teach the level/book, notice and use behavioral evidence to guide your next teaching move.

Powerful early intervention can change the path of a child’s journey to literacy.

To be effective, intervention must incorporate everything we know about what students need to learn, especially those who are experiencing difficulty.

Don't miss the Leveled Literacy Intervention Multi-Day Institute in Garden Grove, CA from Oct. 21-24.

Fountas and Pinnell developed the Systems of Strategic Actions wheel to illustrate the thinking readers are engaged in as they process texts.

Use language from The Literacy Continuum with parents. Each level in the guided reading continuum has descriptions of what students are doing at that level.

Explain to parents and families that levels aren’t intended to categorize students, but in the hands of teachers, they inform instruction.

When communicating with parents, use clear indicators of a student’s processing abilities such as understanding, word-solving abilities, accuracy or fluency.

Every time you introduce a new task, help children make the transition. After a time, children will learn how to make transitions and take on new tasks more quickly and with independence.

When you respond precisely to students' observable behaviors, you can meet students where they are and lead them forward with intention and precision.

The decisions you make based on the data you collect will be the heartbeat of your responsive teaching.

Here are some suggestions for creating places for students to store their work in progress as well as finished work that will be used to assess their progress.