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...

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...

Strategies to help kids identify main ideas

When you ask students to tell you what a reading passage was about, it's not uncommon for kids to just start rattling off tiny little details. One way to combat this problem is to introduce the "fist list."    read more...

Life Maps produce writing topics and aid in reading comprehension

At the beginning of the year, look to provide students with ways to brainstorm potential writing topics based on personal life experiences. Have students draw a life map plotting places, people, holidays, vacations, events, and milestones in their lives for as far back as they remember.    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...

Create simple summaries about main ideas

Main idea asks students to step back from the reading and to identify the gist of what something was about. What's the point? What's the big picture topic? Using the Information Pyramid, students are forced to think more inferentially and not to look for literal answers in the text.    read more...

Challenging students to reference the text to support their thinking

A large portion of most state standardized tests include students writing an extended-response prompt. This requires students to read a passage and then write to a prompted topic. The bulk of a writer's score is based on how he supports his thinking with examples and evidence from the text.    read more...

Key questions in the content areas

When you plan your next set of test or assignment questions, consider paralleling your state’s standardized exam. Here are three ways:    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...