We know that all students need access to grade level content area information, but how can we make this happen with students of so many varying reading levels? Some ways to support students in understanding difficult content area information are using engaging videos, photos, presentations, and giving clear oral descriptions. However, students ...
Reading
Using Digital Graphic Organizers in Distance Learning
Graphic organizers are such an important, versatile support for growing readers and writers. They break down reading and writing skills in a visual way to make each skill clear, and therefore easier to understand and apply. In distance learning, more than ever, students need supports that can work for them in completing reading and writing ...
Teaching Efficiently: Ways to Use the Same Poster
It is so helpful to have reading and writing anchor charts or posters available for students in multiple formats. This way, students have their posters to refer to at home or in different classroom settings besides just the classroom. A few months into the school year, it can be easy to have posters taking over your walls. Although it is ...
Teaching Students to Make Connections
Teaching and practicing reading strategies with students encourages active reading and critical thinking. When students successfully use reading strategies while reading, they are more engaged, and therefore better comprehend what they are reading. Making connections is one of the most important reading strategies to teach and practice often with ...
Reading Comprehension Strategies Crafts: Hands on Activities for Teaching Reading Strategies
Explicitly teaching, as well as continually modeling and practicing reading comprehension strategies with students is one of the most important jobs we have as teachers of growing readers. Research shows that teaching reading strategies encourages students to read and interact with text in a purposeful, meaningful way. The ultimate goal is for ...
Engaging and Meaningful Fiction Reader Response for Elementary Students
Each classroom brings students of multiple learning styles and backgrounds. It is our job to provide opportunities that reach all of the many different learning styles that come to us. For this reason, it is important that we continually switch up the types of reader response we offer to students. Below are engaging, hands-on, visual ways to ...
Teaching Reading Comprehension Strategies: Asking Questions & QAR Strategy
Asking questions before, during, and after reading comes very naturally to skilled readers, but for struggling readers, this skill can be just the opposite. Asking questions of varying depths is arguably the most important reading comprehension strategy we should teach and practice often with our students. WHY IS ASKING QUESTIONS AN ...
Teaching Students to Use Background Knowledge in the Elementary Reading Classroom
Using prior knowledge is an essential strategy for reading comprehension. The more knowledge students have on a topic, the easier it will be for them to understand, and make connections to, new texts. Prior knowledge is also part of the building blocks for more difficult reading strategies, such as making inferences. Below are 8 ways you can ...
5 Ways to Teach Nonfiction Text Structure
Before studying to become a reading specialist, I had never explicitly been taught nonfiction text structures as a student and I also hadn’t been taught the importance of teaching them to our students as an undergrad. They can often be the missing puzzle piece for our growing nonfiction readers. Nonfiction text structures, which are the way the ...
5 Ways to Practice Nonfiction Text Features
As adult readers, we know the importance of using nonfiction text features in order to help us understand the main body of text. Headings help us to make predictions while reading, and then easily find information after reading. Captions explicitly tell us what we are looking at in a photograph or picture that aligns to the text. An index helps ...
