Saturday, 27 September 2014 01:06

Help Students Improve Their Reading Comprehension, Part 2 (Teaching Tip #121) Featured

Written by
Rate this item
(0 votes)
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.
Read 7237 times Last modified on Wednesday, 24 December 2014 17:30

Leave a comment

Make sure you enter all the required information, indicated by an asterisk (*). HTML code is not allowed.