It’s important to remember that the purpose for teaching reading strategies is for students to take ownership of the strategies and begin using them independently from you. If teaching the reading strategies is boring to you and your students, chances are you’re doing too much modeling and haven’t handed over control of strategy use to …
Category: Reading Comprehension
Student Audio Book Reviews
This from fellow Apple Distinguished Educator, Matthew Callison, an excellent tool for engaging students in reading. Mr. Callison works with a third grade population of English Language Learners. He has students record audio reviews of books they are reading and uploads them to this blog, BookLook.org. There are just a handful of reviews so far …
Teach Units, Not Stories
I’ve been noticing that a lot of teachers get bogged down by individual stories in the Open Court units and miss the big ideas of the units. While you do need to teach the stories in the anthology and will need to scaffold vocabulary just enough to give access to English Language Learners, the individual …
Reader’s Theater FAQ
Cable in the Classroom readers: If you’re looking for examples of our video projects, see Video in the Classroom.com Reader’s Theater is a fantastic way to increase reading fluency by providing students with an authentic reason to reread. It also benefits reading comprehension by placing students inside stories.What is it? Reader’s theater involves reading a …
American Heroes Biography Project
This idea was submitted by Mary Hahn, who retired last month after forty-one years in the teaching profession. Many of my best ideas in the past three years have come from her classroom and we’re not even at the same school. Thank you, Mary! This project has worked very successfully in my classroom to get …
How to Use Cloze Stories to Teach Unit Vocabulary
Thank you to Jan Tappan for submitting vocabulary cloze stories for the third grade Open Court units. Cloze stories, for those who need a refresher, are stories with key words left out. Cloze stories can be used to assess student comprehension because if a student is understanding what they are reading they will fill in …