Effective differentiation begins with purposeful assessment. In this strategy guide, you'll learn how to construct an authentic performance-based reading assessment that will give you access to students' thinking before, during, and after reading.
Making the Reading Process Visible through Performance Assessment
Grades
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Inquiry Charts (I-Charts)
Grades
3 - 12
Strategy Guide
This guide introduces I-Charts, a strategy that enables students to generate meaningful questions about a topic and organize their writing.
Grades
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Question the Author (QtA)
Grades
3 - 12
Strategy Guide
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.
Grades
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Exit Slips
Grades
K - 12
Strategy Guide
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.
Grades
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Standards for the English Language Arts
K - 12
Professional Library
| Book
Standards for the English Language Arts presents a vision of literacy education that encompasses the use of print, oral, and visual language and addresses six interrelated English language arts: reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing, and visually representing.
Grades
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Language Learners in the English Classroom
7 - 12
Professional Library
| Book
This book provides practical, research-based strategies that can help secondary-level English language learners meet the challenges of both language and content learning.
Grades
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Building Literacy Connections with Graphic Novels: Page by Page, Panel by Panel
7 - 12
Professional Library
| Book
This collection of essays by classroom teachers demonstrates how to pair graphic novels with classic literature (including both canonical and YA lit).
Grades
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Engaging Grammar: Practical Advice for Real Classrooms
7 - 12
Professional Library
| Book
Amy Benjamin challenges the idea of "skill and drill" grammar instruction, and Tom Oliva provides a teacher's journal chronicling how the concepts in this book can work in a real classroom.
Grades
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BOOKMATCH: Scaffolding Independent Book Selection
6 - 8
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
This lesson will be turning heads and pages as students learn how to choose appropriate books for independent reading exercises and later evaluate their choices.
Grades
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Thoughtful Threads: Sparking Rich Online Discussions
5 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Today's students love chatting online with friends. This lesson combines that love with literature. Students form literature circles and have meaningful online discussions about a literary work.
Grades
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Exploring Careers Using the Internet
6 - 8
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Doctors, astrophysicists, and daycare providers are only some of the careers that will be explored in this lesson in which students research careers and publish occupational summaries about them.
Grades
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Using Word Webs to Teach Synonyms for Commonly Used Words
4 - 8
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Students use word webs to choose synonyms for generic adjectives and to learn to adjust their word usage for different contexts.
Grades
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Using QARs to Develop Comprehension and Reflective Reading Habits
6 - 8
Lesson Plan
| Recurring Lesson
Students are introduced to question-answer relationships (QARs). Using the QAR strategy, students identify different types of questions and learn how to determine the appropriate response for each question type.
Grades
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Reciprocal Revision: Making Peer Feedback Meaningful
6 - 8
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Interpreting art is a subjective process. In this lesson, students write written responses analyzing a work of art and use feedback from their peers to revise or confirm their initial responses.
Grades
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Timelines and Texts: Motivating Students to Read Nonfiction
6 - 8
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
In an effort to help motivate students to read nonfiction, students are challenged to use a timeline to help them name the year when certain products were invented.
Grades
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Creative Communication Frames: Discovering Similarities between Writing and Art
6 - 8
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Graphic organizers assist the development of comparative vocabulary and generate discussions of analogy and metaphor in art as students go on a real or virtual tour of an art gallery.
Grades
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Reading Movies and TV: Learning the "Language" of Moving-Image Texts
5 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Minilesson
Introduce students to the idea that movies and TV have their own language and grammar, which gives them special ways of telling their stories.
Grades
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Finding Solutions to Food Waste: Persuasion in a Digital World
7 - 9
Lesson Plan
| Unit
Using various reading strategies and resources, students explore the issue of food waste. They also create persuasive arguments and blog posts examining this topic.
Grades
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What is Poetry? Contrasting Poetry and Prose
6 - 8
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Students often find poetry frustrating and meaningless. By helping students think critically about the differences between poetry and prose, this introduction sets the stage for different strategies for comprehending poetic texts.
Grades
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Seeing Integration From Different Viewpoints
6 - 8
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
What does the world look like through someone else's eyes? Guide students in using colorful paper glasses to examine a story of school desegregation from multiple perspectives.