More than happy, glad, sad, mad

If you ask students to identify how a character is feeling in a story, you might hear one of the following four words pop up: happy, sad, glad, mad. Character emotions and traits are not something children automatically understand. To help students with this, we need to be intentional.    read more...

Keeping track of mentor texts for reading comprehension

Using mentor texts to build reading comprehension connects students to literacy as they learn specific skills through practice with brief passages. Picture books or short passages from longer works make perfect companions for this type of practice. But how do you keep track of all the different books and passages you want to use?    read more...

Lead students through a nonfiction scavenger hunt

Nonfiction text features offer clues to the reader that aid in comprehension. However, there are many students that ignore these elements and think of them simply as decoration, rather than information. Be intentional about teaching text features, rather than assuming students learned them in a previous grade.    read more...

Teaching students to draw conclusions

While reading text at the secondary level, students need to read for those close-up, tiny details from the text, but they also have to think beyond the text and make inferences. We need to help students learn to draw conclusions and identify the bigger picture, the main idea, or the theme.    read more...

A couple of my new favorites

Another one of my new favorites is entitled "The Mysteries of Harris Burdick." The book consists of fourteen black-and-white drawings, each accompanied by a title and a caption, allowing readers to make up their own stories to complement the pictures.    read more...

Using audio books to reinforce visualization

When kids get in the habit of visualizing during their reading, we know they are comprehending what they are reading. Here's a strategy to teach visualization that can work for all primary-grade students.    read more...

Target reading rate with closed captioning

Fluency is something most primary teachers target naturally. However, intermediate and middle school language arts teachers need to have regular elements of fluency in their curriculum, too. (It's not just about reading to learn; some students are still learning to read in the upper grades.)    read more...

Strategies to target reading fluency with older students

If you are an intermediate or middle school teacher (or a resource teacher, Title One teacher, or special education teacher who works with students in the intermediate and middle grades), then reading comprehension is probably a struggling area for many of your students.    read more...

Frequently Asked Reading Question

What do you do with students who read ahead of the assignment and tell the rest of the class what's going to happen in the book?    read more...

Use songs to target main idea

Eastwood Elementary (New Castle, IN) first grade teacher Susie Allen uses music lyrics to target main idea. After discussing that the main idea is a general, umbrella explanation of what something is about, she plays songs that students aren't familiar with (e.g. "Under the Boardwalk," by the Drifters).    read more...