A third grade teacher describes her approach to helping students comprehend informational text. Her strategies include teaching text features and creating text-dependent questions for close reading.
The text feature walk guides students in the reading of text features in order to access prior knowledge, make connections, and set a purpose for reading expository text. Results from a pilot study illustrate the benefits of using the strategy, and practical suggestions for implementation are offered.
As students grow older, they are asked by their teachers to do more and more with the information they have stored in their brains. These types of requests require accessing higher order thinking (HOT).
Is your school using the Common Core standards? Get to know what the four main areas of the Common Core reading standards mean and simple things you can do at home to help your child build skills in these areas.
Is your school using the Common Core standards? Get to know the four “anchors” of the Common Core writing standards and simple things you can do at home to help your child build skills in all of these areas.
For today’s students, smartphones are essential tools for processing and documenting the world. A field trip offers the perfect platform to show students how phones can offer extra context to their experiences, not distracting but enhancing. This blog post from Common Sense Education shares three ideas to try: scavenger hunt, guided tour, and re-captioning.
Many kids love to read about science and nature as well as real people, places, and events. Nonfiction books present information in engaging and interesting ways. Find out how you can help your child learn to navigate all the parts of a nonfiction book — from the table of contents to the diagrams, captions, glossary, and index.
Expository text can be challenging to young readers because of the unfamiliar concepts and vocabulary it presents. Discover ways to help your students analyze expository text structures and pull apart the text to uncover the main idea and supporting details.
Learn how to implement a research-based text structure strategy that infuses text structures at every step of reading comprehension instruction, beginning with the introduction of the lesson, previewing of text, selecting important ideas, writing a main idea, generating inferences, and monitoring comprehension.
ELL students learn new words everyday, and it’s essential that they have a deep understanding of what those words mean. Without comprehension, new words are useless. The key to helping ELL students succeed is to give them explicit instruction in the academic language of the content they are learning in class. This article offers some strategies and resources for getting started!
Getting information from a nonfiction text can be especially challenging for ELLs, who may not have had much experience working independently with expository texts. This article offers ways that teachers can help ELLs work effectively with nonfiction texts and includes strategies for introducing components, structure, and purpose of expository texts.
Teachers often find it difficult to integrate writing and mathematics while honoring the integrity of both disciplines. In this article, the authors present two levels of integration that teachers may use as a starting point. The first level, writing without revision, can be worked into mathematics instruction quickly and readily. The second level, writing with revision, may take more time but enables teachers to connect the writing process more fully with mathematics instruction. Six examples are provided, including student work, in which teachers have successfully attended to the goals of both writing and mathematics.
This study of first and second graders looked at teacher-led read alouds as a way to introduce science concepts. Results suggest that multiple exposures to a related concept across different stories gave students more time to build a mental representation of important ideas. This evidence suggests that moving beyond a single text as a source for building students’ understanding is an important instructional approach.
In this article written for Colorín Colorado, ELL expert Susan Lafond provides an overview of the ways in which Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts and Literacy differ from the standards that states currently use. She also discusses the ways in which these shifts will impact ELL instruction.
Learn about strategies and ed-tech tools that can help students to reflect on what they did over the summer and then design introductory projects that connect their experiences to the school-year curriculum.
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) learning includes efforts to get kids involved in computer programming. Coding builds logical thinking and problem-solving skills. It’s also creative and collaborative! Find out how you can introduce your child to the basic concepts of programming.
Rather than introducing a new word in isolation, teachers should introduce students to a rich variety of words that share the same root. This approach should help diverse learners including English language learners, make important connections among vocabulary words within the same family, and transfer core ideas across content areas.
This guidance from the International Reading Association represents a consensus of the thinking of literacy leaders in the field who support thoughtful implementation of the Standards for student literacy achievement. Seven key topics are addressed: use of challenging texts; foundational skills; comprehension; vocabulary; writing; content area literacy; and diverse learners.
Give your students a chance to deepen and share their travel experiences through narrative writing, diagrams and illustrations, and the reading of all kinds of print (including maps, brochures and menus). Authentic reading and writing experiences help students connect what’s happening in class to the real world outside.
Read and discuss poetry with nature imagery with students. Take students on a poetry walk around the school, neighborhood, or community to observe and collect sensory images from direct experience with nature: the sights, sounds, smells, and textures of things outdoors. Students can take a poetry journal with them to write down words as they observe, listen, smell, and touch things outside the classroom.
Using students’ questions as a basis for investigations in science education is an effective teaching strategy. Not only do students pose questions they would like answered, but they are asked to find ways to answer them. This article also recommends nonfiction science books that use a question and answer format to find information and model how to communicate what you know.
When students practice observing in science, they use their senses to collect information about objects and events related to a question, topic, or problem to solve in science. Learn some strategies to help students organize and analyze their data through presentations, sharing, and discussion.
Children’s magazines are a wonderful supplement to classroom instruction. Students are exposed to a wide variety of texts and lots of interactive content. From stories, poems, and action rhymes to nonfiction, crafts, puzzles, and games, kids’ magazines can offer an abundance of high-interest content to support your curriculum.
