Teach reading comprehension effectively using the gradual release method. Lost in a Teacher’s Guide I was brand new to Utah. Like, hadn’t even found a place to live so I was staying in my cousin’s basement kind of new. Being a planner, I had gotten early access to my new classroom and lugged out all…
Reading comprehension strategies for 2nd graders and how to teach them. This post contains affiliate links. What Successful 2nd-Grade Readers Know and How to Teach It Reading Comprehension Strategies are Like a Messy Closet You know how when you try to clean out a closet, things get complicated really fast? Soon you end up…
Reading comprehension strategies for parents, teachers, and tutors to use with first graders This post contains affiliate links. Don’t Get So Busy With Decoding that You Forget This In a school hallway lit by fluorescent lights, I sat across a desk from a student. The tip of my pen hovered over a testing booklet as…
How to make reading comprehension instruction engaging with ideas from the book Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters by Kylene Beers and Robert Probst This post contains affiliate links. The Problem With Reading Comprehension Questions The book was thick and heavy with a dark blue cover. The print was small and the pictures were…
Reading Strategies What reading strategies do students need to learn, anyway? It would be so nice if the standards would just spell it out for us! Unfortunately, I’ve never seen that. I’ve racked my brain and made this cheat sheet of the reading strategies I’ve frequently seen in teacher’s guides, professional books, and trainings. Click…
I just love anchor charts so I’m linking up again with Deb from Crafting Connections for: This week my anchor is about author’s purpose. There’s no sense in looking for the author’s purpose just to look for the author’s purpose. If we can figure out the author’s purpose, then we can read purposefully. If kids…
What is close reading? If you look around Pinterest at anchor charts about close reading, it gets really overwhelming really fast! It seems like it’s about every reading strategy you’ve ever seen all put together at the same time. How the heck do you craft a lesson around that? It’s time to take the rocket…
Freebie! One of the keys to teaching reading comprehension is showing kids how proficient readers think about text. Teachers have to find a way to make their thinking visible. One way is with graphic organizers. Here is a free set: The first one is filled in with the steps for growing…
A reading comprehension strategy for elementary students This post contains affiliate links. 6 Signposts for Close Reading If you’re a teacher that means you’ve been successful enough in school to get a college degree. This also means you are probably a natural “comprehender” when it comes to things that you read. I don’t remember being…
I remember a professional development session where the presenter projected a piece of text with lots of blanks where words should have been. A quick glance at the format told us that it was a letter. The first line said, “Dear ______,” Someone instinctively said, “Dear John!” The presenter filled in the word “John.” It…