This guide was produced by the Center on Instruction for technical assistance providers and others who work with state education leaders to improve reading achievement among elementary school students. It describes a suite of "Student Center Activities" (SCAs) designed to offer K-5 classroom teachers a wide range of activities that can…

Examines the benefits of allowing children ample and regular time periods to read on their own and in their own area of interest in relation to the need for children to understand reading as more than a series of unrelated workbook exercises. (HTH)

Offers Request, the Directed Reading-Thinking Activity, the Expectation Outline, the Prereading Guided Reading Procedure, Word Wonder, and Semantic Webbing as techniques that use many of the basic principles of the directed reading activity while adjusting to the needs of specific materials and students. (FL)

Offers suggestions for effective use of the Directed Reading-Thinking Activity developed by R. Stauffer. (FL)

Proposes the "say and write" method and the directed sentence reading method as ways of using language experience stories to develop children's sight vocabulary. (FL)

The traditional approach to reading in the content areas has been to teach reading skills only in reading class, usually using literature or narrative selections and expecting transfer of those skills to content texts or other expository materials. The transfer of those reading skills has been such a disappointing experience that even students who…

Evaluates the characteristics common to most reading programs and offers suggestions for keeping a program a learning rather than a testing situation. (HTH)

Noting that "every pupil response" (EPR) techniques allow for all students in a group to respond to each question asked by a teacher, this paper explains how EPR techniques may be incorporated in a reading lesson to help students develop decoding ability. The paper offers a justification for using these directed teaching strategies based on…

Describes how teachers can incorporate the use of comprehension monitoring activities into the guided reading phase of basal reading instruction. (FL)

Describes how semantic webbing exercises are useful for activating background knowledge, increasing organizational skills, focusing on the topic, and notetaking. (MM)

Describes a Silent Directed Thinking Activity that was based on an abridged version of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" and used with eighth-grade remedial classes. (HOD)

Discusses the applications of Russell G. Stauffer's work to the teaching of reading. (JL)

Suggests using the Guided Reading Procedure as a prereading activity and as a postreading activity when students have read different materials. (MKM)

Presents guidelines that enable classroom teachers to help mildly handicapped students develop two types of text lookback strategies and offers a series of explicit teaching activities that emphasize direct, student-centered instruction. (HOD)

Based on the premise that children's natural love for music makes it appropriate to use songs as a motivational vehicle for reading and writing, this paper presents a reading/singing strategy which promotes vocabulary, word recognition, writing, and comprehension skills while providing appreciation of music. The paper briefly discusses the eight…