Routines that Impact Students Learning to Read

Consistent, daily routines at home impact a student’s school readiness (Ren, Boise, & Cheung, 2022). Routines continue to be important to a student's learning throughout school as well. When routines are in place, students’ attention can be focused on the learning and not on the activity. This can also result in routines being more calming and regulating for students. Natural cues are developed that are nonlinguistic and signal the initiation and the ending of an activity. This provides a sense of independence (Carreiro & Townsend, 1988).

Routines can also be foundational to memory. Procedural memory provides students with an understanding of how things work, and students can be more efficient in remembering information. When it comes to building concepts, routines provide one way of knowing when something has changed so that students can focus on what needs to be learned. A sense of routine also helps with learning about sequence, position, and organizational concepts (Carreiro & Townsend, 1988).

Additionally, routines provide a context for the learning so that students understand when and where to use their skills. For the educator, they help to offer insight into a student’s competency across a task. They also can be tailored to fit the needs of each learner. Since routines establish a set of expectations, they can be subverted deliberately so that students can have opportunities to recognize what went wrong and develop their own solutions. In this way, routines can assist students with being flexible when it comes to solving problems (Carreiro & Townsend, 1988).

Research-backed instructional routines can be found at:

• FCRR Student Center Activities | Florida Center for Reading Research
• Foundational Literacy Instructional Routines – Nebraska Department of Education
• Toolbox | University of Florida Literacy Institute

Connecticut’s Approved K-3 Reading Curriculum Models and Programs may also contain instructional routines for foundational literacy skills.

References

• Carreiro, P., & Townsend, S. (1988). Better Ways to Build Educational Routines. In D. Baine, D. Sobsey, L. Wilgosh, & G. M. Kysela (Eds.), Alternative Futures for the Education of Students with Severe Disabilities (pp. 103–110). University of Alberta.
• Ren, L., Boise, C., & Cheung, R. Y. (2022). Consistent routines matter: Child routines mediated the association between interparental functioning and school readiness. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 61(4), 145–157.