Teaching students to monitor their comprehension is one of the most important parts of reading instruction, but it’s not always easy. Strong readers often do this intuitively. They likely use all of the the strategies below without even realizing it, which is perfectly fine. However, this is not natural or instinctive to all students. Some […]
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Visualizing when reading is not something that comes naturally to all students. In many situations, visualizing has to be explicitly taught, even though it’s often not included in state standards. Whenever the new year begins, I’m always anxious to jump right into my standards. However, I would be doing a disservice to my students. There
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Does this sound familiar to you? You sit at your small group reading table during independent reading and scan your classroom. You see one student sitting quietly staring at their book. You notice that they’re not tracking anything. It’s almost like they’re sleep reading. You see another student “finish” five books in the 15 minutes they’ve
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Combining information from multiple texts is not a skill that can be quickly taught. There is definitely a lot involved! Students must first be able to read and comprehend an individual informative text before they can apply those skills to combine information. Then integrating information takes that comprehension to a whole new level. The good
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One of the more challenging reading standards is explaining events in informational text. “Explain events, procedures, ideas, or concepts in a historical, scientific, or technical text, including what happened and why, based on specific information in the text.” This can be challenging to teach AND for students to master. In this post, I’ve shared some
When I moved back to teaching fourth grade and read the standard “Compare and contrast a firsthand and secondhand account of the same event or topic; describe the differences in focus and the information provided” I was more than a little confused. Once I I spent time unpacking the standard and actually understanding what the
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I used to feel like the standard that required students to reference characters in mythology was a bit random. I struggled with how to tie this in to my reading instruction. But, when looking at the standards in totality, you can see how this builds upon previously taught standards and is a foundation for standards
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Teaching theme has to be one of my favorite topics in reading. It’s probably become of the amazing collection of mentor texts that can be used for teaching theme, as well as how these lessons require students to dig a little deeper. This post shares some of my favorite mentor texts and activities for teaching
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These point of view worksheets, lessons, and activities are a great way to introduce point of view. Even though they’re not exactly the same thing, I also introduce perspective during these lessons. I typically spend about a week teaching point of view and then circle around back to point of view a few weeks later
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Main idea worksheets and activities don’t have to be boring and full or rote learning. This challenging concept is often difficult for students to understand, so they need meaningful lessons. Over the years, I’ve learned that my main idea worksheets and activities need to be highly scaffolded in order for students to grasp this tricky
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