Strong reading instruction develops foundational skills, builds comprehension, and fosters a lifelong love of reading. In elementary classrooms, literacy includes early decoding skills, comprehension strategies, informational text instruction, and meaningful opportunities for students to engage with books.
For the past few weeks we have been reading My Father’s Dragon. It’s on the Common Core Reading List, so I thought I’d give it a try to see how it…
Second graders are at a sweet spot with reading. They are ready for longer stories, strong characters, and running jokes that carry across chapters, but many are not quite ready…
Describe the connections between historical events is a Common Core Standard that is hard to teach! Here is how I taught this standard with the events leading up to the first Thanksgiving. Through this unit, students asked and answered questions, we made a timeline, we read great books, AND we figured out the connection between historical events.
Asking and answering questions can be hard for students! We set up a routine where students would write 6 questions and other students would answer those six questions. This was the perfect way for me to monitor whether students could ask and answer questions about any topic! Here is how we applied it to Thanksgiving.
Folklore, with its rich tapestry of fables, folktales, fairy tales, and legends, makes a great read-aloud and lesson plan. Most of the time, these stories are familiar to students. However,…
The month of November is the perfect time to spend in an in-depth study of the events that lead to the first Thanksgiving. In this blog post, I outline how we…
We’ve been having fun with our Reading Notebooks. I love how this one turned out, so I thought I’d share it with you. First, we read My Name is Yoon,…
Setting goals with students is one of the most powerful ways to build motivation and accountability—especially in second grade. While I’m not quite ready to dive into full-blown individual data…
Reading comprehension posters that focus on 24 reading skills and reading strategies that elementary students use when reading to learn. Some skills and strategies include: compare and contrast, identify main idea, make connections and more. The posters come in multiple formats and are great for helping students learn the language patterns of the comprehension skills. They come with prompts, responses, and graphic organizers.
If you’ve ever tried to run small groups while the rest of your class is supposed to be “working independently,” you already know the truth. It’s never as quiet or…
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