What does the Reading Recovery program involve?

Within the Reading Recovery program, each student's regular classroom instruction is supplemented with a 30-minute daily lesson individually designed to meet his or her literacy needs.
In each lesson a trained Reading Recovery teacher works with the student in reading and writing tasks that aim to develop the effective strategies that are used by independent readers and writers.
The Reading Recovery program brings together a set of strategies that together create the opportunity for sustained improvement in literacy.
1. Individualised instruction The success of the Reading Recovery program is due to individualised instruction by highly trained teachers carefully observing and interacting with each student as a reader and writer.
The trained Reading Recovery teachers are equipped to make informed, effective decisions about the needs of each child throughout each lesson.
Thus, the path of progress, the books read, the messages written and the interactions with the teacher differ from student to student and from day to day.
2. Working with books and stories Within the Reading Recovery program students learn about reading and writing by reading and writing. Learning takes place within the context of actually reading a book or self-generated sentence.
As well as increasing their knowledge about letters, words, sentences and pictures, working with books and stories gives each student the opportunities to gain a mastery of print conventions.
This allows the student to comprehend a text as a whole, just as successful readers do.
3. Accelerated learning “The common goal for children is to reach the average band performance within the child’s own classroom” (Clay, M., 2001 p237)
Students experiencing difficulties need to accelerate - move faster than even those students enjoying normal progress – if they are to reach the average band performance of their peers.
4. Working from strengths Efficient teaching occurs when what is known becomes the springboard for what needs to be learnt.
The individualized instruction of Reading Recovery allows teachers to design daily lessons that build on students' strengths and guide them into the control of new skills.
5. Independent learning The Reading Recovery program allows the student experiencing difficulties with literacy to acquire a self-extending literacy system where finally he or she can work without further intervention.
Students learn to use the strategies that good readers use to read text successfully.
The culmination of any student's program is the demonstration of reading and writing, independent of the Reading Recovery teacher.
The length of the Reading Recovery program varies for each student. Instruction continues until the student can read at, or above, average classroom levels and is assessed as being able to maintain the degree of independence required. This usually takes between 12 and 20 weeks.