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Recent Blog Posts
Expanding Sentences with the “Stretch a Sentence” Technique
A stretched sentence includes more details than a simple sentence. So, teaching students the strategy of stretching sentences is important. For expanding sentences, students answer the questions Who? Doing What? Where? When? and Why? to make a sentence more interesting. Students can use their imagination to include adjectives to describe the subject and adverbs to add to the verbs also helps!
Post Reading Activities for Deeper Understanding
Post-reading activities encourage students to gain a deeper understanding through graphic organizers, news report, exit slips, class discussion, role play, and student responses to questions crafted to encourage students to dig deeper. These after-reading activities get students to analyze the different concepts in a story, including character analysis and main idea exploration of the reading.
During Reading Strategies to Assess Student Understanding
During reading strategies are helpful comprehension strategies to assess student understanding during a reading lesson. These reading strategies provide students with opportunities to practice reading comprehension, using a graphic organizer, note-taking, and critical thinking skills.
Reading strategies like KWL, Reciprocal Teaching, and Story Maps help students organize information as they read.
Important Pre-Reading Strategies to Engage and Prepare Students
A pre-reading strategy is a great way to activate prior knowledge and prepare students for reading. Pre-reading strategies build background knowledge and encourage students like English language learners and struggling readers to comprehend a particular text.
Before students begin reading, they can activate prior knowledge, set a purpose, review key elements, see the big picture, practice note-taking, and get a general understanding of the text by using a graphic organizer or other pre-reading resource.
Effective Reading Comprehension Question Ideas
A reading comprehension question will encourage students to learn more about the main idea in a story. It will encourage students to have class discussions about the comprehension questions, such as inference questions and questions requiring text evidence, which will help with understanding. Main idea questions that require students to write about what happened will keep the reader engaged.
Important Benefits of Reading Aloud for Reading Comprehension
Reading aloud will produce fluent reading in students and increase their reading comprehension. Additionally, it helps students with vocabulary and literacy development.
The benefits of reading aloud are many, but seeing students excited about reading makes read alouds an easy choice.
Find engaging books with rich language and complex ideas and students won't even realize they're learning!
Scaffold Writing Instruction to Help Students Become Confident Writers
It’s so important to scaffold writing during the writing process so that writing tasks are more accessible to students.
Writing success comes from these scaffolding strategies, such as using mentor sentences, mentor texts, and graphic organizers.
When teachers support students with scaffolds such as a graphic organizer or a sentence frame, they become confident writers who see writing success!
Teaching Students the RACE Writing Strategy
Teaching students the RACE writing strategy can greatly improve their writing skills. RACE stands for Restate, Answer, Cite, Explain and can be used for short-answer or paragraph responses. Teachers can use the I Do, We Do, You Do method to directly teach this skill and provide examples of what a RACE response looks like.
To use the RACE strategy effectively, teachers should create constructed response questions that refer to a text and require students to cite evidence. Anchor charts with brief descriptions of each step and sentence starters can help students organize the skill in their minds. Students should practice the RACE response strategy with a variety of reading materials and understand key vocabulary such as constructed response question, evidence, and quote.
6 Activities to Practice Reading Comprehension Skills
Reading comprehension is such an important part of learning to read, but it can get boring and tiresome for students. It’s important to remind ourselves why it’s vital to make sure our students have good reading comprehension skills.
These 6 activities keep students engaged and interested when learning reading comprehension skills.