Children go through phases of reading development from preschool through third grade — from exploration of books to independent reading. In third grade, children continue to extend and refine their reading and writing to suit varying purposes and audiences. Find out what parents and teachers can do to support third grade literacy skills.
Just a few pages from your newspaper can be turned into lots of early learning activities. Here you’ll find “letters and words” activities for the youngest, plus fun writing prompts and tips on how to read and analyze the news for older kids.
To have productive text-based discussions, we have to pull apart the texts ourselves — hunting for barriers to comprehension at the word, sentence, paragraph, and passage level.
A third grade teacher describes her approach to helping students comprehend complex text. The R.A.C.E. approach (Restate. Answer. Cite. Explain.) can be helpful in identifying the four critical elements students should consider in a text-based response.
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.
Written especially for parents, Growing Readers provides monthly tips for raising strong readers and writers. All of our tip sheets are available in English and Spanish.
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.
Improve instruction and help all students achieve at high levels by making these research-based adjustments to your balanced literacy program. This guidance outlines some of the most common challenges of a balanced literacy model, how they can impede students’ learning, and how you can adapt your reading program to better serve students.
All students learn in different ways, and ELLs are no exception. Creating opportunities for hands-on learning in the classroom can provide another way for students to grasp difficult concepts.
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).
