Students should be engaged with texts that do what to support their reading skills?

Engaging students with texts that follow a predictable pattern is beneficial for supporting their reading skills, particularly for early and developing readers. Texts that have a predictable structure provide a sense of familiarity and allow students to anticipate what will come next. This predictability helps build confidence as students learn to recognize common patterns in stories and texts, which can enhance their comprehension and fluency.

When students can rely on the patterns in the text, they are better equipped to focus on other important aspects of reading, such as making inferences, understanding context, and building their vocabulary. Predictable patterns can also aid in developing phonemic awareness, as students start to see connections between sounds and the letters that represent them.

While engaging with varied sentence structures, unfamiliar vocabulary, and factual information all play roles in a comprehensive reading program, the use of predictable patterns is particularly important for foundational reading skill development.