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"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.

Carnegie report follow-up to Writing Next. This report provides evidence answering the following three questions: 1. Does writing about material students read enhance their reading comprehension? 2. Does teaching writing strengthen students' reading skills? 3. Does increasing how much students write improve how well they read?

This article was very interesting to me. I teach reading in an urban district so 'Delivering What Urban Readers Need' caught my eye. The article talks about the reading difficulty in schools that are predominately minority and economically disadvantaged. This article contains information on: 'An Acute Problem', 'Strategies for Urban Readers', 'Provide Balanced reading Instruction', 'Identify Those At Risk', 'Provide Supplemental Instruction', 'Encourage Active Student Responding', 'Teach Within Small Groups', 'Monitor Student Learning', 'Create Peer-Mediated Learning Environments', ' Practice Nonexclusionary Classroom Management', 'Help Parents Reinforce Learning', and 'Offering Learners Their Best Chance'. I found the section on providing a balanced reading instruction to be the most relative and intriguing to me. After reading this article, I feel more confident then ever that all students need repitition! "Good reading instruction is explicit, intensive, and systematic. Such instruction is beneficial for all learners, but it is nonnegotiable for students at risk for reading failure." This article is important for teachers in urban districts or even if you have 'at risk' students...truly worth a look.

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This article gives excellent advise on how to step-by-step teach non-fiction writing to ELLs. It gives tips on do's and don't's and reasons why things work and don't work when teaching students new to the country that are especially helpful for grades 3 and up. I believe strongly that reading and writing need to be linked to have meaning for students. As we teach reading in our content areas, we also need to teach writing skills to go with those reading skills.

The article says that most ELL students who had schooling in their former country will try to write in their own language and then translate into English and this becomes problematic, because the formats of sentence structure do not match in most languages. I don't really have this problem, but understand how this could become a problem. I do have the problem of sentence structure with the way my students speak, therefore when they write, the sentence structure is not proper. The article gives a step-by-step guide starting with organizers to teach non-fiction writing. I really liked the fact that it said to use sentences in the organizers. I have been using organizers with my class and trying to teach them to write fragments and then write the sentences later and found that problematic. I thought that I was trying to teach them to get their ideas on paper quicker, but after reading the article believe that it would be easier to teach them to write the proper sentence in the organizer and then transfer it to paper.

I do love it when I find something that contradicts what I've previously done or known. Gives me pause to think. It will be interesting to see if this change in your thinking produces results in your students' writing. Keep us posted!

For my first journal, I read this article about multi-sensory language arts instruction.  It claims that if you can provide students with visual, auditory, and tactile-kinesthetic methods for learning, they are more likely to be successful.  One of the things that I agreed with most strongly that it seems many educators today shy away from is the idea that students should "practice to the point of automatization."  Automatic reading is not the key to comprehension but it is surely a necessary foundation for meaningful reading.  When I was a student, we practiced grammar and spelling until it was second-nature and generally my current abilities testify to that.  However, we have steered away from correctness in favor of sparing student egos.  I do not think that it has done them any good.  I wholeheartedly agree with this article that we MUST train our students to be good readers and writers. 

More emphasis is being placed on fluency. You can't understand what a text means if you can't figure out what it says. We don't want students to simple "bark at print" but there has to be a balance between fluency and comprehension.Was there anything in the article you would apply to your own teaching?

Reading is more than looking at the words on a page. Critical Reading involves re-Reading text to "dentify patterns of elements -- information, values, assumptions, and language usage-- throughout the discussion. These elements are tied together in an interpretation, an assertion of an underlying meaning of the text as a whole."

"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.

Second-Language Reading Comprehension and Vocabulary Learning with Multimedia Lee B. Abraham Hispania , Vol. 90, No. 1 (Mar., 2007), pp. 98-108 Published by: American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20063468 This article presents a research study where ESL students were put into 3 groups a control group, a forced look-up group, and a choice look-up group. The study was trying to find out if using multimedia would aide in the increase in vocabulary in ESL students. The study found that students in the control group had little vocabulary growth, but the students in the two other groups had the same percentage growth of 18%. When I first started Reading this article, I was interested to see if using multimedia tools would increase the vocabulary. I was specifically interested in the use of technology. There is no differentiation about which types of multimedia are better. As I further read, I thought that the students who were given a choice of what to look up would make more growth, because they would be working off their own motivation, but the study showed that whether they were forced to look up words or had a choice, they made the same growth. This reinforces the importance of teaching my students to use context clues, but when that doesn't help, to learn how to use a dictionary and the computer to find the meaning for words.

This blog written by Maria Salvadore is very encouraging for adults that have young children or work with young children on a daily basis. This blog points out the facts that when young children are engaged with their reading, they are more likely to always remember the books they read at a young age. Parents and other adults will see what books become the child's favorite ones. These favorite books will be the ones that the child wants to read over and over again without skipping any parts of it. Teaching children the benefits of reading at a young age will most likely make them avid readers when they grow up. reading Rockets' children's literature expert, Maria Salvadore, brings you into her world as she explores the best ways to use kids' books inside - and outside - of the classroom. Books entertain, educate, inform, engage, and more - more than we may realize. Readers meet others and see themselves in them.

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"This action research project investigated the effects of daily teacher read-alouds on first graders' ability to sustain silent reading for an extended length of time." Current Issues in Education published by Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. 2011

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.

Love Steve Peha, he writes like he speaks! Very interesting blurb about teaching reading in the content areas. I like that I am trying to focus more on non-fiction in my room, as was mentioned here, but realized I need to really make it explicit the differences between reading fiction and non-fiction.

As I was looking for sources for my research paper, I came across this website that I think is excellent so I wanted to share it with everyone. I know people have posted information from this website but when I was looking through course book notes, I didn't find this specific section of the website posted so I thought I would post it. This site provides roughly 50 reading strategies and explains what they are and how to use them. The one cool thing I like about the site is that it breaks each strategy into three phases: Before reading, During reading, and After reading. For each strategy, it tells you in which phase should you implement the strategy. I hope this is helpful to everyone!

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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 handy site provides various graphic organizers you can use with your reading selections. They are available for download and as printables in either Word or PDF formats.

This handy site provides various graphic organizers you can use with your reading selections. They are available for download and as printables in either Word or PDF formats.

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.

OK- so maybe this is a stretch for extra credit, but even if it isn't worth any extra points - still cool to share - hopefully all you "real" teachers unlike myself know about this!  Any k-12 student that reads 5 books gets 2 for 1 pricing on tickets plus no ticketmaster fees - yay for sports and reading!

Not a stretch at all, Gina! The whole idea is to share what you find. If its new to you, it's likely new to someone else. In my case, it was a good reminder! :)

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I found this site that has free reading worksheets and short stories that are geared towards beginning ESL students reading levels. It incorporates lifeskills lessons as wells as geography, history, holidays, and famous Americans. It seems like a great resource for social studies. I actually found a worksheet with a camping theme to use with our "Camp-Reads-A-Lot" theme day we are doing tomorrow. This particular worksheet has a paragraph, true/false questions, personal questions, and a little writing section. I also found a worksheet about the American Flag, which is great, because we are studying American symbols. This worksheet has 3 paragraphs of information about the flag, true/false questions, and a Daily Oral Language type "correct the sentence" section. These aren't something I would use in isolation, but they are a great resource for adding to and differentiating instruction.

A neat website that has premade packets that are ready to go. Includes flash cards with specific letters, worksheets, picture cards, and different games. Helpful to very young students learning their alphabet and looking to improve their reading as they are starting out. 26 Alphabet Packets Download, Print, and Assemble--Anytime, Anywhere Build a foundation for successful reading and writing with these research-based alphabet materials. Alphabet resources are one part of a comprehensive reading tutor/mentor program targeting essential reading strategies.

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Literacy