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...

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...

Picture books build background knowledge on hard-to-grasp topics

Most picture books (also known as "children's literature") are usually 32 pages or less with illustrations on every page or double-page spread. At first glance, most middle school and high school teachers would walk past them assuming picture books to be for an elementary classroom only. However, the power of these texts is that it can help students learn more about the world around them.    read more...

Motivate your writers by using “My Space”

For those of you trying desperately to motivate apathetic students at this point in the year, tap into their enthusiasm for digital technology. Mark Sopko, River Forest Jr/Sr HS teacher (Hobart, IN), asks students to develop mock MySpace pages for different characters in their literature.    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...

My three favorite chapter books

For the longest time my top two favorite whole-class read alouds included Love That Dog, by Sharon Creech and The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, by Kate DiCamillo. But my newest favorite was inspired by fourth grade teacher Crystal Callaway at Bailly Elementary (Chesterton, IN).    read more...

Stronger literature responses with the 6 Traits

Writing about your reading is a typical expectation in middle school writing. But beyond a summary of the reading, Language Arts teachers often work to develop students’ ability to respond to the literature. This might include drawing connections among texts, analyzing the text for figurative language, critiquing the text for a particular characteristic, using the text to support a specific opinion, etc. But what do you do when students repeatedly write weak literature responses? How do you elicit stronger ones?    read more...

Try something new — A literacy notebook

Many teachers have implemented a writer's notebook concept into their classroom. But what about a reader's-writer's notebook -- a literacy notebook? Since we are trying to create writers who write for readers, and readers who read like writers, then merging the two together makes sense.    read more...