Displaying items by tag: helping kids improve their reading
Saturday, 11 October 2014 20:34
Help Students Improve Their Reading Comprehension, Part 3 (Teaching Tip #122)
This week I share with you the third and final visual in the set that my students and I have been using during our Reading Workshop to help us improve our comprehension.
This visual focuses on the skill of predicting and includes three main teaching tips.
1) Readers can use their knowledge of the characters to predict what will happen next.
2) Readers can use their knowledge of story structure to predict what will happen next.
3) Occasionally, readers need to revise their predictions as they read.
In case you missed the first two visuals, you can click on the following links to access visuals focusing on the strategies of envisioning and inferring. I hope you and your students enjoy these tools and find them useful.
Click here for a jpeg copy of the predicting visual.
This visual focuses on the skill of predicting and includes three main teaching tips.
1) Readers can use their knowledge of the characters to predict what will happen next.
2) Readers can use their knowledge of story structure to predict what will happen next.
3) Occasionally, readers need to revise their predictions as they read.
In case you missed the first two visuals, you can click on the following links to access visuals focusing on the strategies of envisioning and inferring. I hope you and your students enjoy these tools and find them useful.
Click here for a jpeg copy of the predicting visual.
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Blog
Saturday, 27 September 2014 01:06
Help Students Improve Their Reading Comprehension, Part 2 (Teaching Tip #121)
Last week, I shared a visual that my students and I have been using during our Reading Workshop to help us bring to life the strategy of envisioning. This week, I share the visual that we have been using to help us with our second reading comprehension strategy, inferring. As children progress to higher levels of independent reading, they need to be able to combine their own knowledge with clues that authors provide to produce inferences.
Student understanding of inferring increases even more when they perform the following chant while referring to the visual. This chant, along with several others, can be found in my book Rock It! Transform Classroom Learning with Movement, Songs, and Stories.
This "call and response" chant begins when children say the words "story clue," put their palms together, and then open the hands as if opening a book. Next, they make the addition sign with their forearms as they say, "plus." In part 3, they point to the brain and say, "my own knowledge." After that, they say "equals" and make the equal sign with their forearms. Finally, they say "inference" and make a capital "I" with their hands: one hand vertical, the other hand going back and forth to make the top and bottom horizontal lines. Doing this chant a few times per day over a period of days leads to excellent results.
Click here for a jpeg copy of this visual.
Student understanding of inferring increases even more when they perform the following chant while referring to the visual. This chant, along with several others, can be found in my book Rock It! Transform Classroom Learning with Movement, Songs, and Stories.
This "call and response" chant begins when children say the words "story clue," put their palms together, and then open the hands as if opening a book. Next, they make the addition sign with their forearms as they say, "plus." In part 3, they point to the brain and say, "my own knowledge." After that, they say "equals" and make the equal sign with their forearms. Finally, they say "inference" and make a capital "I" with their hands: one hand vertical, the other hand going back and forth to make the top and bottom horizontal lines. Doing this chant a few times per day over a period of days leads to excellent results.
Click here for a jpeg copy of this visual.
Published in
Blog
Saturday, 20 September 2014 20:15
Help Students Improve Their Reading Comprehension, Part 1 (Teaching Tip #120)
During our first Reading Workshop unit of the school year, my students and I have been focusing on three important comprehension strategies. To make the learning "stick," I have been using simple visuals that convey the meaning of each strategy in an engaging, user-friendly way.
This week I am sharing with you the visual that brings to life our first strategy, envisioning. For children to understand what they read, they need to be able to see "the movie in their mind" clearly. As teachers, we want to encourage children to picture the story so well that they actually feel like a character in the book.
Using Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as an example, this visual provides a nice introduction to these concepts. The popcorn image located at the top right further reinforces the idea of "watching a movie" as we read. Visuals #2 and #3 are coming soon.
Click here for a jpeg copy of this visual.
This week I am sharing with you the visual that brings to life our first strategy, envisioning. For children to understand what they read, they need to be able to see "the movie in their mind" clearly. As teachers, we want to encourage children to picture the story so well that they actually feel like a character in the book.
Using Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as an example, this visual provides a nice introduction to these concepts. The popcorn image located at the top right further reinforces the idea of "watching a movie" as we read. Visuals #2 and #3 are coming soon.
Click here for a jpeg copy of this visual.
Published in
Blog