Reveal visual triggers for comprehension strategies

South Adams Elementary School teacher Kristi Geimer (Berne, IN) utilized information from previous Smekens' workshops and developed a growing bulletin board to aid her students in reading comprehension strategies she's been targeting...    read more...

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...

Parent involvement for literacy

We would all agree that the more involved a parent is in a child's life, the more likely that child is to succeed in school. But parents don't always know what to do. Many parents struggle with how best to help and would love some simple ways they could come alongside.    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...

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...

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...

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...

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...