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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

Carol Porter-O'Donnell wrote this great article that helps students use the technique of annotating to help students improve reading comprehension. Before reading this article, I was pretty unfamiliar with what annotating is. This article is well written and gives excellent strategies that will help your students increase comprehension. I highly recommend reading this article if you have time.

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.

So many books! Apps for reading and a great website to help students or anyone to find out what's available to download on their iPods, smart phone or any other piece of technology that's out there kindle etc. and many are free to download.

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I really enjoyed this book, and it gave me great insights into how students are wired. How do they take in information and how do students use that information. There are four styles of students. The book goes into different ways of working with students and talks about how students concentrate, remember, and understand information. I liked the book because it provided useful information and tips on how to interact with students. I realize that learning styles have gotten a bad rap by some educators. Now having said that learning styles do present an interesting piece of the puzzle to how students learn. It is important to note that a learning style is a preference rather than an ability to learn. Individuals have a tendency to like information or processing to be done a certain way because there is a familiarity and comfort level. The awareness of a learning style can assist educators in setting students up for success by phrasing information in certain ways or pointing out that this information may be more uncomfortable for individuals to learn because of the way it is presented. The book is organized by learning style category and then by subject areas like concentration, understanding and remembering. The first six chapters focus on learning styles, and the remaining six chapters delve into specific topic areas as each relates to learning styles. The main topics of the book are learning styles, and three central topic areas related to learning. The topic areas are concentration, remembering, and understanding. The overall message of the book is that every person may have a dominant learning style, however each person has a certain amount of each learning styles' characteristics. Moreover as students, parents, and teachers become aware of their learning style it is meant to help them achieve and adapt to others who are not wired that way, not to be used as an excuse for poor performance or I can not do something.

You raise some important points, LeAnn. I think also it is important to help students (and ourselves?) learn to tap into other styles to further develop them.

Here is a very helpful link. It talks about all of the ways to teach reading in the elementary classrooms. It describes shared reading, readers theater, and guided reading just to name a few. I found it very helpful and a great resource,

This website I still have from back when I was student teaching. My cooperating teacher wrote this website down on a sticky note for me and I have kept it ever since. I student taught fourth grade and have been successfully using Mandy's tips in my sixth grade reading classroom ever since. Here is a breakdown of what exactly is on this link: What Is Guided Reading? Schedule (of the guided reading) What Are the Other Kids Doing? Planning for Reading Groups Starting Guided Reading Guided Reading Activities That Teach What Does the Teacher Need for Guided Reading Lessons? Leveled Book Lists If you are new to 'guided reading' or are planning out your guided reading groups, then this is a great place to start. Her schedule is broken down for an elementary classroom but I have adjusted her schedule and tweaked it to fit my 50 minute blocks of students. Works well-depending on the grade and the reading level of your students.

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"Teachers succeed as teachers only when their students succeed as learners" This website is intended to assist middle to high school students with nonfiction writing. This website has resources and strategies for teaching nonfiction to teens and adults. 'You Can Teach Writing' consists of blogs, writing topics, teacher services, student services, books, and events. If you teach older students this is great for some ideas :)

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This blog is run by two Engilsh teachers and is a great resource for teachers because it focuses on what teachers want to know about a book: who will want to read it and how it could be used in a classroom. For example, the teachers talk about "A Wrinkle in Time" because of its 50th anniversary edition.

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The is a website that I used often when teaching. I think this is a valuable website because it has a lot of information and resources on comprehension strategies that were helpful in the classroom. The site also has a great section on readers theater with tons of scripts to download.

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The National Archives Digital Classroom: Primary Sources, Activities and Training for Educators and Students. This site is very helpful for social studies teachers, however the part that I think would be helpful for teachers of most subjects is the worksheet analysis documents. The documents help students analyze documents, cartoons, films, etc. I thought it was a great way to assist students in interpreting and helping them understand different documents that they will encounter in various courses.

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