The Rainbow Reading Programme is designed to present students with a variety of topics, authors, styles and illustrations to make reading interesting while skills are improved. Each story or article has been carefully selected because of its educational value and attraction to a wide range of students with varying needs and interests.
Books are levelled, colour-coded, and are accompanied by specially recorded audio available on Audio Reading Pens or as MP3 files to provide support and a good model for readers. A comprehensive Teacher’s Manual and Training video ensure that this simple, yet effective programme (which incorporates repeated readings) can be easily implemented (often by Teacher Aides).
Assessment sheets feature the titles of the books presented for teachers to take Running Records to monitor progress. Cloze (Text Completion), Text Sequencing, Word Search, Writing and Dice Game sheets provide meaningful text-related activities.
The Rainbow Reading Programme (and recently New Heights) has been developed, thoroughly researched and trialled by qualified reading specialists in New Zealand. It has been enthusiastically accepted by teachers and students worldwide through distributors in N.Z, Australia, U.K, Sweden, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Africa.
The Rainbow Reading Programme is non-threatening, supportive, interesting, enjoyable, economical, easy to implement and effective at improving reading skills. On average, students consistently make gains of 12 months in reading level every 10 weeks of half hour practice, 5 times a week.
Research & Notes
Research Documents:
- Audio support and your literacy programme (PDF)
- Research Base of Audio-facilitated Reading (PDF)
- Rainbow Reading Study – St Therese School (PDF)
- Langford Report (PDF)
- Research Summaries (PDF)
- Rainbow Reading Effectiveness (PDF)
- Rainbow Reading Nelson Project (PDF)
- Using audio-taped readalong stories – Nalder, S and Elley, W (PDF)