A second grade Title I teacher conducted a study on how to help students become better comprehenders and to see what strategies students could be taught that would help them to comprehend and recall what they read. Participants were in an extended day program; they attended class after school two days a week. The section taught by the…

Literature Circles are a great way to supplement a reading program in a literature-based classroom. In this lesson plan, students create and answer comprehension questions, discover new vocabulary, and examine elements of literature. The students feel ownership in Literature Circles, because they are responsible for the meeting. Any genre of…

Reciprocal teaching is a scaffolded technique based on teacher modeling, student participation, and four strategies that good readers use to comprehend text: predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing. Although reciprocal teaching originally was designed for use with struggling readers, this book offers innovative lessons aimed at…

Researchers have found that readers they described as "strategic" had a purpose for reading, that they monitored their comprehension as they read, and they reflected on their reading. Although most readers have grasped fundamental reading processes by age 12, they still do not have well-articulated concepts about effective strategies to…

With the help of the teacher, students will read fairy tales and identify common elements. Choosing common situations and working in small groups, students will draw storyboards of their fairy tale and then write the fairy tale. Project will conclude with class presentations. During ten 50-minute lessons, grade 3-5 students will: listen and read…

This series of four videotapes and a viewing guide is designed to complement the book "Strategies That Work: Teaching Comprehension to Enhance Understanding." Its author/educators invite teachers to help their students read for deeper meaning and insight, employing a group of research-based strategies that proficient readers use to…

This collection of Peace Corps stories is designed for use by grades 7-12 language arts teachers. The collection is divided into two sections, (1) Peace Corps Stories; and (2) Curriculum Units. The first section contains nine Peace Corps texts around which the lesson plans are organized. Representing a variety of literary genres (personal…

Primary students solve "oversized" story problems using drawings, equations, and written responses, helping them understand the links between the language of story problems and the numerical representations of matching equations. The activity also includes oral language and reflective writing, thus bringing together a variety of language…

This book focuses on what a quality reading program for children in kindergarten through third grade should look like and how parents can support that program at home. It includes a letter to parents and a list of tips for supporting reading. The guide encourages parents to focus on the five essential components of reading: Phonemic Awareness;…

This short book gives an overview of a curriculum plan, a plan to develop the kind of learners that young children should become. The purpose of this self-directed learner curriculum is to help parents and educators guide young learners so they become capable, purposeful, responsible citizens. It provides an outline of the steps needed to develop…

The effect of the Read Aloud accommodation on the performances of learning disabled in reading (LD-R) and non-learning disabled (non LD) middle school students was studied using selected texts from the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) achievement battery. Science, Usage and Expression, Math Problem Solving and Data Interpretation, and Reading…

Presenting the story of how discussion became the foundation of a teacher's classroom practice, this book examines reading development in a group of second graders, observing classroom discussions and the transformation of a basal-reading curriculum into one which used literature-study groups. The book reports on close-up classroom observation as…

This book explains how to administer, score, and interpret the Basic Reading Inventory. Included are graded word lists and graded passages that can be used with students to help place them in appropriate reading materials, to assess their comprehension, and to determine their strategies for word identification. Significant additions to the seventh…

Significant progress has been made in designing beginning reading instruction for young children with reading disabilities (RD), but much less is known about children with RD in the intermediate grades who read very poorly despite several years of instruction and exposure to print. The aim of this research was to compare the influence of text…

This experimental study examined the effects of multimedia on Internet news readers, in particular focusing on Web site design and its effect on comprehension and recall of news stories. Subjects (84 undergraduate students) viewed one of two versions of the same Web site--one with multimedia and one without. The Web site consisted of six stories…