TEMS520

This was my starting point for my second Journal article. I am a visual learner, and I like things organized, so I love graphic organizers. This article was a great starting point on different things that you can use to help students with their reading. I use them regularly for my social studies class as a way to encourage students to read the chapters and learn material. It is great at assisting them make connections. In history there are a lot of cause-effect relationships and graphic organizers help students "see" that very clearly.

Our group's Weebly site with teacher resources and lesson plans for teaching about the 1920's as well as the novel, "The Great Gatsby"

I thought I posted this but apparently I didn't share it to the group! Yikes!

"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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This is such a cool way to close a lesson, a unit, or a school day!  

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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The author presents a convincing argument for emulating instructional design found in "Angry Birds."

Sixth-grade language arts teacher Donalyn Miller joins other teachers and education bloggers who are including reading goals and challenges as part of their New Year's resolutions. Miller, who asks her students to reflect on the reading they did last year, encourages educators to participate and share goals of their own and their students for reading in 2012.

As reading teachers (and every teacher is a teacher of reading!) it is important for us to think about, and let students see, ourselves as readers. What are your personal reading goals?

I just wanted to mention that I read the Book Whisperer and loved it! I also had the opportunity (along with Elvisa) to listen to Donalyn Miller speak at the MRA conference last year in Grand Rapids. She is inspiring! I hope to read 2 books during Mid-Winter break AND Spring break. It is hard to read for pleasure with work, college and the other endless commitments!

"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.

"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."

A nice printable teacher guide to plagiarism.

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This site is full of excellent links for teachers. Hope this is helpful

Thank you for sharing this site! :)

Since my goal is to be a special education teacher I figure I'd make that the focus of my article search. This particular article is meaningful because it lists specific strategies to help the student with a reading disability. The first strategy listed is to encourage reading by finding reading material that the student enjoys. Reading material they want to read will help to improve reading comprehension and fluency because the student won't feel forced to read something they are not interested in. Keeping a graph of the student's reading progress helps to motivate them to improve their reading skills by making it a challenge. Also readers who struggle can track with their finger or a ruler in order to keep their place and their focus. Sounding out stumble words is a strategy to use when the student is struggling with a particular word. A strategy that I have never thought to use before is to record the student reading so they are able to listen back and judge their own fluency. For secondary students, have them keep a word journal notebook. They can record the words they get stuck on when reading and then study them. Lastly, using reading games is a great strategy for any age group. Even high school special education students enjoy a game of Scrabble, and playing word games improves their reading skills. The bottom line is to make reading fun for all students, and especially for readers with disabilities.

Nice job pulling out the specific strategies, Wendy.