Context Clues in Info Texts (Part 2) – Conferring with Students
Posted on February 4, 2025Share This Content
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Have you ever asked a reader to tell you about what they learned in a short nonfiction book or article and they do one of the following? Or does the student do one of the following? If you experience the former more than the latter, it may be worth your time to engage the students …Read more
A few weeks ago I was in a conference with a student reading a book about the sea lizard. When he came to a word he didn’t know, he mumbled the word and kept going. Do you have students that do this? These students are self-monitoring but they lack fix-up strategies. They know when they …Read more
Do your students struggle to compose sentences about nonfiction topics that make sense or sound right? Do they lack structure at the sentence and paragraph level? Here’s a few tricks I’ve been trying with small groups of late-early and transitional stage readers. Generate key words As part of a conversation generate key words they will …Read more
If students are reading multiple texts on a topic and taking notes on each of those sources, I require that (or strongly suggest) they write notes in phrases–just enough words to help them remember what they learned or what the author was saying or the student’s response to information. In most cases, I strongly encourage …Read more
Do you students notice when authors provide definitions and examples? Many nonfiction authors use these and other types of details when they describe concepts like forces, magnets, weather and so forth. Readers need to recognize these types of details to understand these concepts. I was surprised one day to find out the middle grade students I …Read more
When annotating, do your students underline (or highlight 😉 most of what they’ve read because they think “it’s all important”? Maybe they’ve underlined that much because they don’t know how to determine what is important? Below I describe a Phase 2 demo lesson I gave to tackle this issue – focused on helping students identify …Read more
When I ask students if they ever think about lunch or something else while they are reading, most give me a thumbs up! After we get past the “shocked teacher” look, I talk to them about the importance of staying focused and monitoring for whether they are understanding the content in the source. Then I …Read more
Have you ever conferred with a student who had difficulty recalling what they’d read? Or who seemed to recall the “easy to understand” parts of a text but not the harder parts? These students may need instruction on monitoring for meaning. I use the Coding Strategy (Hoyt, 2008) to reinforce self-monitoring. After each sentence or …Read more
In the third entry of this series, I describe three reading conferences I had with students focused on making sense of context clues and share some tips.