Teaching Reading

As students get to more advanced material, the focus of studying moves to reading, comprehending and recalling material that has been read from textbooks, articles or other material. One way to build comprehension power is to teach students to summarize.
Summarizing involves pulling the important points from reading material, organizing them, and paraphrasing them in [...]

Want to build reading comprehension skills?  One fun tool is the mini-mystery.  These go by assorted names, and they come in books and on websites, but the general idea is that they present a little mystery story in just a few paragraphs, complete with clues for the solving.  A careful reader can pick up on [...]

Phonics instruction, especially, lends itself to practice using the Bingo format.  Make a blank Bingo board, and then duplicate it to your heart’s content.  When you want to make a new Bingo game, just grab the blanks and start creating.  I’ve made Bingo boards to review sight words, to practice vowel sounds, go over letter [...]

If you teach in an elementary classroom or run a summer or after school program that teaches reading, you’ll want to listen up!  I’ve got a nine-issue series of a duplicate-able newsletter designed to help parents understand how to support teachers as they teach reading.  It’s called “The Parents’ Guide to Reading,” and it makes [...]

Here’s a teaching method that can be a life-saver for teachers working with struggling students, limited resources, or unmotivated pupils.  Language Experience is a broad term that basically means that each student’s own language is used as a basis for teaching reading and language arts skills.
The basic idea is this: If a student can put [...]

Reading comprehension is one of the most talked-about topics in this arena, so I’m always on the lookout for outstanding articles about comprehension. You’ll want to check out Seven Strategies To Teach Students Text Comprehension over at Reading Rockets. This article does an outstanding job of outlining ways in which reading comprehension can break [...]

One way to help children learn phonics attributes and word analysis skills is through word sorts.  These activities will help with reading as well as spelling.  The basic premise is that words can be put into groups based on various phonetic attributes, such as a long or short vowel sound, number of syllables, type of [...]