Reading Strategies
Are your students buried in post-its? Oversharing with those text-to-self connections? Parroting back comprehension tips but rarely applying them when they are actually reading? Our contributors sort through what works with strategy instruction, and have wise advice for avoiding superficial approaches to developing comprehension skills.
Latest Content
Morning Message Series: When and How
It’s not always easy to hold on to effective instructional routines and find ways to embrace new initiatives and mandates. In the first installment of a morning message series, Ruth Metcalfe addresses the issue of time.
My Teaching Toolbox (Part 2)
Dana Murphy reminds us that having a teaching toolbox makes planning efficient and effective. In this second installment of a two-part series, Dana offers two additional approaches to delivering strong reading instruction.
Managing Your Students’ Independent Work During Guided Reading
Are you ready to ditch small-group instruction because it seems too difficult for students to work independently? Lisa Mazinas compiled a helpful chart to problem solve common classroom issues and support student independence.
Moving Beyond Asking Questions
Dana Murphy comes to a lesson about asking questions in a curriculum resource and realizes it is not what her students need. She has designed a lesson to make asking questions more meaningful and useful for her students.
Literacy Toolkits
Inspired by toolkits with math manipulatives, Jen Court created literacy toolkits with the help of her first-grade students. These toolkits grow and change across the year and according to student needs, and they help students “touch their thinking” and become more independent readers and writers.
Read Aloud Magic
Jen Court reminds us of the power of reading aloud to students and pushes us to remember the importance of planning to use books to engage students and hone teaching points.
Spoiler Alert: You Can Start Big to Go Small (Macbeth in One Class Period)
Gretchen Schroeder confesses her fast-paced approach to sharing Macbeth with her high school students. Starting with the big picture of the story and then drilling down into specific scenes for skill practice not only accomplished the goals for the unit, but also freed up more time and space for other curriculum needs.
Cut-Apart Sentences in Small-Group Reading
Ruth Metcalfe candidly shares the way she tackles the transfer of reading skills with her small group by using cut-apart sentences.
What Do You Meme: Logical Fallacies
Gretchen Schroeder teaches her high school students how to notice and combat logical fallacies, a much needed skill due to the fact that most of her students use memes as their primary news source.
Examining Book Choices with New Awareness of Bias
Bitsy Parks takes into account her recent consideration of implicit biases and examines her classroom library and read-aloud choices with urgency and excitement.
Digital Reading Strategies
Mandy Robek reflects on her identity as a digital and print reader and offers strategies to support students reading digital texts.
Lessons and Minilessons: What’s the Difference?
What’s the difference between a lesson and a minilesson? Christy Rush-Levine finds that flexibility is just as important as length in making minilessons work well.
Pairing Video Clips with Text: The Great Depression
Mark Levine has his middle school students “closely read” paired videos as well as texts to ponder the value and accuracy of different historical sources.
The Freewrite Pause
Mark Levine finds his middle school students need more time to digest learning from brief articles. Freewriting provides the perfect pause for promoting more reflection and insight.
Reading and Thinking Aloud in Middle School
Mark Levine combines reading and thinking aloud in a minilesson to help his middle school students grapple with complex texts.
The Third (or More) Time Is the Charm
Gretchen Schroeder finds helping her students see the value in rereading poems is all about helping them pay close attention to imagery.
Student Notes: Slow Down and Think
Fifth grader Orion uses sticky notes to make questions and predictions at the end of each chapter.
Student Notes: Reading for Writing
Reagan, a fifth grader in Franki Sibberson's class, explains how she uses sticky notes to flag examples of writer's craft she could use in her own writing.
Student Notes: Reminders for Later
We continue our video series from Franki Sibberson's class of fifth graders explaining how they take notes while reading. Sarah marks important elements early in the mystery she is reading, so she can easily refer to them later.
Splashing Around to Find Themes
Christy Rush-Levine moves from emphasizing theme to teaching strategies for understanding text, and finds it’s a much better way to get her eighth graders to grapple with theme in natural, organic ways.
Student Notes: Keeping Track of Many Characters
Tre uses lots of sticky notes to sort through and keep track of characters in a book with a whole classroom full of personalities.
Student Notes: Experimenting with Two Strategies
What do student notes from independent reading look like when students have free choice? In this video series, fifth graders from Franki Sibberson's class explain their notetaking strategies. We start with Ally, who tries out two different strategies to figure out which one will help her the most.
Conferring: Establishing a Setting in a Novel
In this week's video, Aimee Buckner has a quick conference with a fourth grader about ways to solve a dilemma — how to figure out the setting in a historical fiction novel when there are no pictures.
Revising Thinking Through Multiple Readings
We’ve all had that student — the one who blurts out a misreading of a text, only to have classmates agree with the analysis. Christy Rush-Levine explains how she uses “first-, second-, and third-draft readings” to help her middle school students develop stronger comprehension skills.
Fostering More Rereading in Classrooms
Stella Villalba explains why rereading is especially useful for young English language learners, and shares some simple strategies for integrating more rereading strategies into reading and writing workshops
Using Read Alouds to Build Fluency
Tara Barnett and Kate Mills find an ingenious way in the upper elementary grades to help their struggling readers develop fluency through read alouds.
The Power of Picture Book Conversations
Katie DiCesare uses conversations around picture books to build communication, community, and reading skills in her first-grade classroom. Late in the school year she reflects with students about why these conversations are so powerful.
Thinking About Fluency
Cathy Mere finds that with young learners, not all issues with fluency are created equal—different needs require different strategies.
Putting the “Gradual” Back into Gradual Release of Responsibility
If it’s not sudden release of responsibility or no release of responsibility, what does gradual look like? Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan bring this model to life.
#articleaday
Justin Stygles uses a daily nonfiction article activity as a way to build interest in nonfiction short texts, especially among reluctant readers in his classroom.
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