Group items tagged

"Seven Strategies to Teach Students Text Comprehension". It's always nice to have a quick go-to guide for quick tips.

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Journal #1 I really like this article because it spoke to my content area, social studies. I think it is important that students understand how they read a novel for English will be different than reading a history textbook or a newspaper article, and therefore require a different strategy. I use primary and secondary documents, as well as text books, and so students sometimes struggle with comprehension of these different materials. I also use Supreme Court case documents and students have difficulty with those especially. Part of it is vocabulary, but part of it they really don't have a strategy for figuring it out. I think providing them with a strategy of how newspaper articles are structured vs. text books would be very helpful for those learners who have difficulty understanding what they are reading. I was also happy to find out that there is a website that I can access that may assist me with helping teach literacy for social studies. Yea!

This article also provides concrete examples of students reading history like historians, which is really important. And text structure and features defintely plays into this as well. I am so glad you found something meaningful for you as a teacher and learner! Nice use of tags! (Is this for your Journal #1?)

LeAnn, I also think it is very important that students read a textbook differently from the way they would read a novel. Having students take on the persona of a Historian I believe would help them better understand history and how it went about developing our country and our pasts as well. That is wonderful that you are searching for ways to make a more meaningful connection between the students and history textbooks.

I re-read this (highlighted) passage from the article about 3 times to absorb it. When I first became a literacy coach about 10 years ago, our district was just transitioning to the idea of leveled text and guided reading. It was all about giving struggling readers text at their instructional level--easier to access. Now the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) necessitate a shift in that thinking as we need to push students to interact with more complex texts at a higher level of thinking. So I think we can still consider instructional levels (and need to) to help students become proficient readers, but we need to "up the ante" in our book talks to help students go deeper into the meaning.

"Teachers of English need to reach the tough guys out there, and they are probably not going to do it by prescribing another go at The Sound and the Fury. The problem is not so much that tough guys lack the brainpower to read: they simply do not want to." I like the suggestions given for books to motivate adolescent male readers given in this article. I appreciate how Lawrence Baines has collected information over the years to share with us as teachers.

I always try to do an interest inventory with students and find books that fall into these interests to offer for independent reading time. I also love informational books that center around sports and life oddities, such as Ripley's or Guiness Book of World Records. Boys seem to like these types of books. I have used Sports Illustrated for Kids also as an offer for reading. For class books, I have used "The Air Down Here" by Gil Alicea, a teenage boy from the Bronx. It is written in journal format and tells about his life in his own words. I used this with 8th graders and the boys especially seemed to "grudgingly" get interested and want to read more! I also found that books about aliens, Big Foot, Sasquatch and those types of informational books were interesting to them as well!

When I was a media center teacher, I could not keep the Guinness or Ripley books on the shelf! I think besides the "ew" factor, another draw is (of course) the pictures, and small chunks of text.

Jabberwocky is a poem written by Lewis Carroll. It is from his novel: Through the Looking Glass. It is written in nonsense language and has potential to be a fun poetry lesson for high school. The website offers ideas for using as well as background information on the poem. My kids knew about it from Johnny Depp in the current Alice in Wonderland movie. It might also work as a short piece of text for teaching some of the strategies we have talked about in class.

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"Part of the reason my students have such a hard time reading is because they bring little prior knowledge and background to the written page. They can decode the words, but the words remain meaningless without a foundation of knowledge. To help build my students' prior knowledge, I assign them an "Article of the Week" every Monday morning. By the end of the school year I want them to have read 35 to 40 articles about what is going on in the world. It is not enough to simply teach my students to recognize theme in a given novel; if my students are to become literate, they must broaden their reading experiences into real-world text." Includes links to articles used as well as articles used in previous years.

INSERT is a strategy with several uses. Students mark a text (with pencil or sticky flags) with symbols such as +. -. !, ? to monitor their comprehension during reading. These marks can then be used by the teacher to help students engage in discussions, and clarify understanding. Students can also use the marks to make notes after reading.

"This article describes dictogloss, an integrated skills technique for language learning in which students work together to create a reconstructed version of a text read to them by their teacher."

"APA (American Psychological Association) is most commonly used to cite sources within the social sciences. This resource, revised according to the 6th edition, second printing of the APA manual, offers examples for the general format of APA research papers, in-text citations, endnotes/footnotes, and the reference page. For more information, please consult the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 6th edition, second printing."

APA 6th edition is the required style for your research papers. This page lists the most common formatting guides.

"WritingFix is a teacher resource website that contains lessons and ideas for any educator to freely use in their K-12 classrooms....The site is sponsored by the Northern Nevada Writing Project, a not-for-profit professional development organization that is located on the University of Nevada-Reno Campus." An absolutely amazing goldmine collection of writing ideas: mentor texts, 6 traits, revision, genres, and MORE!

I realize the focus of our class is reading. This resource is too good not to bring to your attention.

Though it does not focus on reading, I have found that WritingFix absolutely saved me in my first year teaching ELA. Even if it is simply "saved for later" this is something all teachers should review.

This article was about labeling "readers" and how teachers identify students by whether they were or were not "readers". Not everybody has the same definition or meaning of the word "reader". What characteristics do we as teachers assume someone possesses when he or she is (or is not) a reader? The article suggests that most people refer to the word "reader" as someone that possesses the ability to recognize letters and decode some words and sentences. Yet the people in the study often categorized reading as an activity that they regarded as more focused, literary, and part of high culture, not daily life. Also, the reading that happens every day is not what most teachers mean when they talk about a student being a reader. This article further states that being a "reader" is generally a positive identity for young children and often negative for adolescents. The following paragraph was meaningful to me and truly hit home: I believe it is important that we talk more with our students about what kind of qualities we expect from the people we identify as readers. For one thing, we need to explore with students the multiple and varied nature of reading. We need to remind them that they are constantly being readers as they go about their lives, and we need to talk with them about all the ways they engage in reading and for what purposes. (We can also remind them that reading is often pleasurable and can be so in school as well as outside of it.) After reading this article, I believe teachers should take into account that outside of the classroom students are reading such texts as video game magazines. I plan on emphasizing to my students that good readers do not necessarily read fast, do not necessarily understand what they read the first time, usually read important works more than once, and often finish reading with more questions than they started.

"I plan on emphasizing to my students that good readers do not necessarily read fast, do not necessarily understand what they read the first time, usually read important works more than once, and often finish reading with more questions than they started." This is so important, Renee! Students need to know that even adults as experienced readers sometimes struggle with text or go back and re-read. Kelly Gallagher talks about how, as a high school English teacher, his kids don't realize that he "gets" all the symbolism, etc. in the Shakespeare works because he's read them 20 times. This article also gave me a different perspective on our "Me as a Reader" activity. Thanks for sharing!

Finding effective ways to teach today's student population is perhaps the greatest challenge facing literacy educators in the United States. As classrooms become increasingly diverse, educators struggle to find curricula and pedagogical strategies that are inclusive and affirmative yet facilitate the development of academic and critical literacies.

How might you apply some of the researcher's findings in your own (current or future) practice? Do you now of teachers who have implemented aspects of this type of critical literacy?

Prof. Clinton, In my own future practice the application from this article that I found most useful was teaching popular film and media in the classroom. In the new core curriculum I know that one of the standards includes comparing text to its corresponding film and evaluating and analyzing the changes that directors have made in adapting the text to film. It would just be a matter of finding a more current relevant film that has a corresponding novel that is grade appropriate and having students study the book before watching the film. I also see value in evaluating music lyrics in a poetry unit. As of right now the host teacher that I am working with hasn't done any of this. She abhors poetry and pretty much refuses to show films in class, although we haven't had much opportunity to since our school assigns readings based on lexile and right now there is no way to have a whole class read the same novel since their reading levels are all so different. I think with the core curriculum standards rolling out next year we'll really have to.

Zimmerman, S., & Hutchins, C. (2003). 7 keys to comprehension: How to help your kids read it and get it. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press. 7 Keys to Comprehension is a powerful read that I would recommend for both teachers and parents that want to encourage reading for enjoyment and understanding. This book is simply written and well organized making it an easy read for teachers and parents. The book outlines the 7 key strategies that good readers use in order to create meaning. What I really like about this book is that each chapter is designated to one of the key strategies, making it easy to look up and refer back to. Inside each chapter the authors discuss each strategy and why it is important to reading success. The authors also provide examples of how to help children at varying levels (preschool, emerging, and advanced) with each strategy. As a teacher, one of my favorite things about each individual chapter is that a list of picture books and more advance books is given to use when working on the specific strategy. I also like that at the end of each chapter tips are provided to highlight the main idea of the chapter and simple ideas to implement the strategy. When I was teaching first and second grade, this book was always on my bookshelf because it was so easy to pick up and refer back to when I had students that were struggling. This was also a book that I had shared with my coworkers and parents because the strategies are used in every grade on some level and are not geared specifically for classroom use, but also for parents to use at home while reading with their children. Many times parents would ask me how they could help their child with reading and I would often lend them this book or give them strategies from this book to use at home. In lower elementary so much time is spent on decoding skills and learning to read the words, but a huge part of reading is comprehension and although stude

By Cathy Puett Miller Of the five key reading components identified as essential by the National Reading Panel, fluency is the stepchild. It certainly gets less attention than the others, perhaps, in part, because its exact meaning often is cloudy. Many educators seem even less certain about how to teach it effectively. This article provides a three step approach and some tips on how to increase fluency. It's a short read with some great ideas... I hope you enjoy it!

Fluency has recently come more to the forefront. Some say it's a good proxy for comprehension, which makes sense, because if you are spending all or most of your brain power just figuring out what the text says, there isn't much left to figure out what it means. +2

With classrooms becoming more and more mainstreamed I thought that this article/website would help general education teacher understand how to create a Behavior Intervention Plan. This text focuses more on kids with autism which I found to be important because of the increased awareness of students with this disability. Student with autism can be a challenge for any teacher to teach. The skills that they usually can be taught are social, daily living, and task skills. One way to help in assisting teachers and the students in doing this is creating behavior intervention plans. With autistic students we need to use special strategies to teach them these skills and the behavior intervention plans provide that strategy. There are several steps that go into the behavior intervention plans that ensure that the students get the most out of the plan. First the teacher will need to record the student's behavior. The behaviors the teacher is looking for are problem behaviors like biting and throwing objects and skill behaviors like language or social skills. Also the teacher will need to record the frequency, duration, and time of these behaviors. Next would be an ABC analysis of the student. The A part means antecedent, what happened before the behavior. The B part would require an analysis of the behavior itself. The C part would be the consequence of the behaviors or what happened after. Following this be choosing a target for the student or goal such as choosing 1-2 skill behaviors and 1 problem behavior to work on. The last few steps include choosing a Right Intervention Strategy for the student with autism. This could include choosing reinforcement such as sensory time, making a structured schedule, and consistent intervention to any issues. In the end you should always continue to analyze the behavior intervention plan.

This website text is about teachers learning to motivating students during this new era of standards. Student's psychological needs are some of the most important aspects of education. We want to understand why some students come to school prepared to learn while others are not. Why are our dropout rates at the rate they are? With standards on the rise and all of the other factors associated with a student's education coming into play we can be leaving our students at a great risk. Knowing what their needs are can help ease this risk. With this knowing how to motivate students, their need for competence, need for belonging, need for feelings of usefulness, satisfying the need to build optimism, and need for feeling potency can help not only students but schools overall. They are all part of the CBUPO Theory. This is not easy to achieve but it is possible.