Read and Understand Stories & Activities


Book Description

23 reproducible stories for practicing comprehension, developing vocabulary, letter-sound association, word families, and rhyming.




Read, understand and write


Book Description




Reading Response Forms: Understanding Gr. 5-6


Book Description

**This is the chapter slice "Understanding Gr. 5-6" from the full lesson plan "Reading Response Forms"** Give your early middle school students the tools to demonstrate their understanding and to share their thinking about the literature that they have read. Our flexible and open-ended resource can be used in conjunction with all varieties of literature. Increase your vocabulary with antonyms and synonyms to words you remember from the text. Demonstrate your understanding of the novel with a plot chart. Apply what you know by writing a detailed letter to a character from the book. Write your own ending based on your analysis of the novel. Find quotes from the characters and evaluate why each one was important. Be creative and rewrite a part of the story from a different point of view. Aligned to your State Standards and written to Bloom's Taxonomy, reproducible and hands-on activities, crossword, word search, comprehension quiz and answer key are also included.




Reading for Understanding


Book Description

In fall 1999, the Department of Education's Office of Educational Researchand Improvement (OERI) asked RAND to examine how OERI might improve thequality and relevance of the education research it funds. The RAND ReadingStudy Group (RRSG) was charged with developing a research framework toaddress the most pressing issues in literacy. RRSG focused on readingcomprehension wherein the highest priorities for research are: (1)Instruction




Reading Response Forms: Understanding Gr. 3-4


Book Description

**This is the chapter slice "Understanding Gr. 3-4" from the full lesson plan "Reading Response Forms"** Let your young readers share their thoughts about the literacy that they have heard or read themselves. Our valuable and easy-to-use resource provides a wide variety of skill-based worksheets and purposeful hands-on activities that are all based on the six levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Use to supplement your present reading program or as independent student work. Our worksheet activities will help to engage and build the full range of thinking skills essential for reading comprehension and focus on many other skills including: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Also included is a teacher implementation guide, student assessment rubrics, word puzzles, color graphic organizers and a comprehension quiz. All of our content meets the Common Core State Standards and are written to Bloom's Taxonomy.







Close Reading Literature Activities for Grades 4-8 Survival Stories


Book Description

Students analyze three popular novels using key skills from the Common Core. Close reading of the text is required to answer text-dependent questions. Included are student pages with the text-dependent questions as well as suggested answers.




Understanding and Teaching Reading Comprehension


Book Description

The ultimate aim of reading is not the process but to understand what we read and comprehension can take place at many different levels. There has been an increasing emphasis on the importance of reading comprehension in recent years but despite this there is very little written on this vital topic accessible to trainee and practicing teachers. The Handbook of Reading Comprehension presents an overview of recent findings on reading comprehension and comprehension problems in children. It provides a detailed examination of the characteristics of children who have reading comprehension difficulties, and examines ways in which comprehension can be supported and improved. It is accessibly written for students and professionals with no previous background in the psychology of reading or reading problems. This indispensable handbook asks the question ‘what is comprehension?’ The authors consider comprehension of different units of language: understanding single words, sentences, and connected prose and outline what readers (and listeners) have to do to successfully understand an extended text. This book also considers comprehension for different purposes, in particular reading for pleasure and reading to learn and explores how reader characteristics such as interest and motivation can influence the comprehension process. Different skills contribute to successful reading comprehension. These include word reading ability, vocabulary knowledge, syntactic skills, memory, and discourse level skills such as the ability to make inferences, knowledge about text structure, and metacognitive skills. The authors discuss how each one contributes to the development of reading comprehension skill and how the development of these skills (or their precursors) in pre-readers, provides the foundation for reading comprehension development. Areas covered include:- Word reading and comprehension Development of comprehension skills Comprehension difficulties Assessment Teaching for improvement Throughout the text successful experimental and classroom based interventions will be highlighted, practical tips for teachers and summary boxes detailing key points and explaining technical terms will be included in each chapter




The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo - Literature Kit Gr. 1-2


Book Description

Find out what it's like to be the middle child and what it means to be able to stand out and feel special. Students gain a deeper understanding of their own mind to visualize what makes them unique. Sort words from the story as short a or long a vowels. Complete quotes from the story with their missing quotation marks. Recognize whether Freddy practiced for his part before or after he showed how well he could jump. Students draw their own interpretation of Freddy's costume for the play, and explain how it fits and some of its important details. Brainstorm things that would make a good play and things that would make a bad play. Students compare themselves to Freddy in a Venn Diagram graphic organizer. Aligned to your State Standards and written to Bloom's Taxonomy, additional crossword, word search, comprehension quiz and answer key are also included. About the Novel: Freddy Dissel feels trapped between an older brother and younger sister. As the middle child, he feels neglected by everyone around him. He lost his room to his younger sister, and now shares with his older brother. He doesn't get new clothes of his own, but instead wears his brother's hand-me-downs. He is too young to play with his older brother, but too old to play with his younger sister. One day, Freddy learns of a school play and decides to try out for it. The only problem being, it's only for the fifth and sixth graders. But that doesn't stop Freddy. He lands a special part as the green kangaroo. Now Freddy can shine out front, no longer stuck in the middle.




Text-Dependent Questions, Grades K-5


Book Description

Fisher & Frey’s answer to close and critical reading No doubt since the cave paintings of prehistoric times, humans have asked questions to make sense of the message. So what could possibly be new about posing questions about text? Plenty . . . and with TDQ, Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey reveal it all. After one quick read, you will have learned all the very best ways to use text-dependent questions as scaffolds during close reading . . . and the big understandings they can yield, especially when executed the Fisher and Frey way. But that’s just for starters. Fisher and Frey also include illustrative video, recommended texts and questions, examples from across content areas, and an online professional learning guide, making the two volumes of TDQ a potent professional development tool across all of K-12. The genius of TDQ is the way Fisher and Frey break down the process into four cognitive pathways that help teachers "organize the journey through a text" and frame an extended discussion around it. Step by step, this approach ensures that in every close reading lesson, students are guided to consider explicit and implied meanings, and deeply analyze and appreciate various aspects of a text, especially those that may be challenging or confusing. Here’s how the four inter-related processes play out, with every why and every how answered: What does the text say? (general understandings and key details) How does the text work? (vocabulary, structure, and author’s craft) What does the text mean? (logical inferences and intertextual connections) What does the text inspire you to do? (write, investigate, present, debate) The cool thing? These questions ignite students’ engagement and discussion because they strategically lead students to a place of understanding where explicit and implied meanings and interpretations can be debated. Far from being overly literal or teacher-led, the questioning framework Fisher and Frey advance enhances the quality of student talk and idea-generation. All in all, there’s no better resource to cultivate students’ capacity for independent reading and incisive thinking. Longtime collaborators and recipients of numerous teaching and leadership awards, DOUGLAS FISHER and NANCY FREY are Professors of Educational Leadership at San Diego State University as well as teacher leaders at Health Sciences High & Middle College.