Teaching Reading
Our contributors lead reading workshops in classrooms with creative flair. Over the past 12 years, we've filled our site with loads of suggestions, tools, and tips for using engaging books throughout the curriculum to hook kids on reading. Here is where you will find many stories of successful and not-so-successful workshop days, and what we learned from them. We bring these stories to life through hundreds of video examples.
Latest Content
Comparing Authors Minilesson
Jen Court uses text sets from three authors to help second graders ferret out different elements of the authors’ styles.
Text Set Resources
Melanie Meehan shares some of her favorite resources for developing text sets.
Conferring to Connect: First-Grade Reading
Bitsy Parks confers with first grader Ella about the Brown and Pearl book series, and then listens to Ella read. She closes the conference by encouraging Ella to make more personal connections to books.
Text Sets: Reading Beyond Just Facts
Franki Sibberson explains how carefully curated text sets can help students move beyond a “just the facts” exploration of nonfiction topics.
Textual Lineage
Christy Rush-Levine uses book covers to help her middle-school students explore their histories (or “lineages”) as readers.
Moving from Interactive Read Alouds to Book Clubs
Tammy Mulligan shares how teachers can move seamlessly from thoughtful conversations during whole-class read alouds to lively book clubs.
Do Students Need to Love the Books We Read Aloud?
Franki Sibberson asks a critical question: Do students need to love the read alouds we share in classrooms? She works to move students beyond shallow like/don’t like responses to books.
Read Aloud in Middle School
Katherine Sokolowski values read aloud for her middle school students and struggles to find time for them. Her solution? A picture book a day, better known as the #bookaday activity.
Grand Conversations and Read Aloud
Are your conversations during read aloud stilted or shallow? Tammy Mulligan recommends weekly “grand conversations” to spark more thoughtful talk. She provides the tools you need to get started in your classroom.
Back-Channel Conversations During Read Alouds
Christy Rush-Levine considers some of the “underground” ways in which she converses about books at conferences and on social media, and decides to set up a back channel for similar conversations about read alouds in her classroom.
Interactive Read Aloud and the Whole-Class Notebook
Tammy Mulligan enhances the quality of the class read aloud and student discussions with the use of a whole-class response notebook.
Speed Reading
Adolescent learners can face daunting reading loads in high school that they need to tackle at home. Jen Schwanke has tips for how teachers and parents can work together to help teens develop strategies for dealing with a lot of complex reading quickly.
Read-Aloud Annotations: Google Slides
In this video series, Franki Sibberson’s fifth graders share their strategies for annotating the class read aloud. In this installment, Antonio shares his Google Slides.
Read-Aloud Annotations: Google Docs for Questions
In this video series, Franki Sibberson’s fifth graders share their strategies for annotating the class read-aloud. In this installment, Lauren uses Google Docs to record questions to explore as she listens.
Read-Aloud Annotations: Expectation and Reality
In this video series, Franki Sibberson’s fifth graders share their strategies for annotating the class read-aloud. In this installment, Lizzie uses her notebook to focus on expectations and reality for characters, especially when it comes to stereotypes.
Read Aloud Annotations: Using Google Slides to Focus
In this video series, Franki Sibberson’s fifth graders share their strategies for annotating the class read-aloud, In this installment, Reagan uses Google Slides to focus her thoughts and analyze different characters.
Read-Aloud Annotations: Thoughts to Themes
In this video series, Franki Sibberson’s fifth graders share their strategies for annotating the class read-aloud. In this installment, Stone uses Google Slides to record thoughts and tease out themes.
Read Aloud Annotations: Predictions
In this video series, Franki Sibberson’s fifth graders share their strategies for annotating the class read aloud. In this installment, Sharvari uses Google Slides with text boxes to record predictions and thinking.
Read Aloud Annotations: Characters and Intentions
In this video series, Franki Sibberson’s fifth graders share their strategies for annotating the class read aloud The Girl Who Drank the Moon. In this installment, Ben creates a graph in his notebook to record characters and intentions that are emerging in the story.
Read-Aloud Annotations: Notebook Predictions
In this video series, Franki Sibberson’s fifth graders share their strategies for annotating the class read aloud, The Girl Who Drank the Moon. Students have their choice of using notebooks or tech devices, and can pick any strategy that helps them make sense of the story. In this installment, Hannah shares her notebook where she highlights the setting and characters, as well as makes predictions.
Unadulterated Reading
Just reading. Pure, unadulterated reading. That’s the reading homework that matters most in the long run. Stephanie Affinito explains why.
Reading Bingo
Gretchen Schroeder has developed a fun version of Reading Bingo to help students explore their identity as readers. The activity includes clever social media inspired options like creating memes and “bookstagram” posts.
Linking Evidence to Reading Response in First Grade
Tara Barnett and Kate Mills are discouraged by the random and idiosyncratic responses to reading they are seeing among first graders. They implement a series of lessons to help students move to evidence-based reading responses.
Readers Want to Respond
Matt Renwick is surprised when his son completes a reading quiz that isn’t required, and finally realizes it’s all about reading response.
The Power of Similes
If you want stronger poetry from students, a good starting point might be to explore how to write a powerful simile. Gretchen Schroeder explains how she helps her high school students play with and create better similes.
Reading The Crossover: Fourth-Grade Reading Group
Gigi McAllister leads a group of boys who are just starting the novel in verse The Crossover in her fourth-grade classroom.
Evidence Claims in a Middle School Small Group
Christy Ruth-Levine leads a small group of eighth graders as they explore how to include textual evidence in their literary analysis essays.
Readers’ Guides: Helping Students Think About Informational Text
Suzy Kaback finds the task of creating readers’ guides helps students in the intermediate grades think about evidence in texts in more sophisticated ways.
Hunting for Textual Evidence
Gretchen Schroeder finds just telling her high school class to include textual evidence when making points and arming them with sticky notes leaves many students bewildered. She regroups and comes up with activities to scaffold their understanding of what makes for valid evidence.
Teaching Tone: Deal Me In
Gretchen Schroeder’s high school students are surprised to see a deck of cards on their supply list. The cards are a tool for teaching the vocabulary of tone in creative ways.
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