What about using the language of text structure to help students compare texts?
Posted on February 9, 2016Share This Content
teaching nonfiction comprehension
“Building” analogy to teach “text structure”
Posted on January 10, 2016How many of us hunt for the perfect texts to teach “text structure” and end up just banging our heads against the wall? It’s because texts are more complex than five simple structures. Below I describe an analogy I’ve started using with students to get beyond this problem. A building has a purpose (to be …Read more
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The Coding Strategy – Helping Students Monitor for Meaning (Updated)
Posted on December 8, 2015Have 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
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The Pasta Analogy-Helping Students Determine What’s Important
Posted on November 12, 2015Do your students struggle with determining what is important when reading informational texts? Are they unsure of what to underline and annotate? I remember one fifth grade student saying, “Well, I underlined the whole text because it was all important!” Two suggestions. 1. Make sure there’s a VERY CLEAR PURPOSE for reading & determining what …Read more
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Complex sources? Give students a head start with THIEVES
Posted on September 5, 2015Teaching students to use the mnemonic THIEVES (Manz, 2002) to preview a text is an easy way to nurture students’ sense of agency as they tackle feature-dense nonfiction sources. The poster below (created by a colleague!) reveals the details of this strategy–students preview, predict & then summarize their predictions. A FEW TIPS Create THIEVES bookmarks …Read more
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Guided writing lesson – a productive struggle
Posted on April 18, 2015I had the honor of teaching a small 2nd grade group of students a guided writing lesson after we had done a guided reading lesson with an excerpt from an A to Z text, George Washington Carver, Level O. In a previous post, I wrote about the first lesson – close reading of an excerpt …Read more
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Tips for using ‘Reading A to Z’ texts for close reading
Posted on April 8, 2015Reading A to Z is a common classroom resource for leveled informational texts. There are some good texts in this collection – I would just be cautious, read for quality, and choose with clear objectives or text-dependent questions in mind. Below I describe how a group of teachers and I chose excerpts from Reading A …Read more
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Easier Main Ideas – Think Traits of Historical Figures
Posted on March 13, 2015I’ve been thinking about how we can help students identifying multiple main/central ideas in a text. Traditionally we’ve focused on identifying one main idea, but beginning in 5th grade (and continuing in 6th and 7th), the Common Core Standards for Reading Informational Texts expect students to be able to “determine two or more main ideas …Read more
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Teach “example” as a type of detail info text authors use
Posted on January 9, 2015Take a moment to read the following text excerpt. Where does the author include examples of a concept? Why is that helpful to readers? Look closely and you will see. Magnets can be found on a can opener. The magnet attracts, or pulls, a lid off of a soup can. A push or a pull …Read more
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Taking shared reading text to small group instruction
Posted on December 15, 2014A few weeks ago, I visited several second and third grade classrooms to give a shared reading lesson and then take a small group into a guided reading lesson with the same text. Loved this!!! It makes complete sense that if I build knowledge around magnets or echolocation during a 20-30 minutes shared reading lesson …Read more
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Teaching the language of text structures can help students compare and contrast texts more easily. I gave a lesson to a 5th/6th grade class a few weeks ago with two current event articles on drones. The first article “How can you get a bird’s eye view?” from Wonderopolis is written in an enumerative (or descriptive) …Read more