Close readings allow primary students to engage with complex texts. Through repeated reading, students build a deep understanding of the text and critical thinking skills.
Get Close to Think Deeply: Creating Primary-Level Close Readings
Tracking and Supporting Student Learning with Kidwatching
In this strategy guide, you'll learn how to use kidwatching to track and support student learning. Teachers observe and take notes on students' understanding of skills and concepts and then use the observations to determine effective strategies for future instruction.
Using Partner Talk to Strengthen Student Collaboration and Understanding
In this strategy guide, you'll learn about Partner Talk—a way to provide students with another learning opportunity to make learning their own through collaboration and discussion.
Introducing Ideas and Vocabulary with the Concept Sort
A Concept Sort is a vocabulary and comprehension strategy used with students to introduce new topics and/or familiarize students with new vocabulary.
Using Paired Reading to Increase Fluency and Peer Cooperation
In this strategy, students read aloud to each other, pairing more fluent readers with less fluent readers. This strategy can also be used to pair older students with younger students to create "reading buddies."
Shared Reading Opportunities for Direct Literacy Instruction
Shared reading affords teachers the opportunity to teach reading strategies in larger groups. The shared text and teacher support offer unique opportunities for instruction.
Supporting Students As They Read Independently
This guide includes basic theory and practice for supporting students reading independently, which is the last instructional context along the gradual release of responsibility.
Using Guided Reading to Develop Student Reading Independence
This guide presents basic structures for implementing guided reading, which involves working with small groups of children possessing similar strategies and challenges when encountering new text.
Teacher Read-Aloud That Models Reading for Deep Understanding
This guide describes the basic elements for reading aloud to students in ways that demonstrate thoughtful and deep interactions with the text.
Inquiry Charts (I-Charts)
This guide introduces I-Charts, a strategy that enables students to generate meaningful questions about a topic and organize their writing.
Question the Author (QtA)
In this guide, you'll be introduced to a strategy that requires students to challenge their understanding and solidify their knowledge while reading a text.
Exit Slips
This strategy guide introduces the concept of using Exit Slips in the classroom to help students reflect on what they have learned and express what or how they are thinking about the new information. Exit Slips easily incorporate writing into the content area classroom and require students to think critically.
Performing Poetry
Performing poetry incorporates oral reading, literature, and the performing arts. This strategy can benefit content area readers, English language learners, or learners with special needs.
The (Un)Making of a Reader
Through looking critically at the underpinnings of "story mapping, a teacher uncovers a contradiction between the author's definition of reading as a constructive process and the reductionist nature of story mapping, which she shows inhibits students' potential to explore a diverse range of personal responses by promoting comprehension over response, uniformity over diversity, and control over freedom.
Sound and Sense in Children's Picturebooks
Explores (from the point of view of the writer, a children's author) one aspect of learning about language that is present in the picture books he writes: the relation between sound and sense.
"Genre Studies"
In this issue you will read about elementary children who are introduced to genre primarily through their teachers reading aloud. The children are invited to become inquirers who continue to explore books as they meet in small groups to write and read on their own—from fantasy to African folktales to poetry.
Joyful Noises: Creating Poems for Voices and Ears
This article discusses the efforts of a fifth-grade teacher and a visiting poet to rekindle students' sense of poetic passion and pleasure and describes how the authors introduced students to poems for two voices.
Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing
With full recognition that writing is an increasingly multifaceted activity, we offer several principles that should guide effective teaching practice.
Resolution on Promoting Media Literacy
This resolution discusses that understanding the new media and using them constructively and creatively actually requires developing a new form of literacy and new critical abilities "in reading, listening, viewing, and thinking."
Guideline on The Students' Right to Read
The current edition of The Students' Right to Read is an adaptation and updating of the original Council statement, including "Citizen's Request for Reconsideration of a Work."