Students examine opening sentences of texts they will read during a unit or course and make predictions. They return to their predictions throughout the course as they read the texts.
Focus on First Lines: Increasing Comprehension through Prediction Strategies
Active Reading through Self-Assessment: The Student-Made Quiz
This recurring lesson encourages students to comprehend their reading through inquiry and collaboration. They choose important quotations from the text and work in groups to formulate "quiz" questions that their peers will answer.
Shared Spelling Strategies
Students increase their spelling accuracy and retention, while preserving fluency, by using sound, sight recall, and analyzing strategies instead of memorizing words, as they deal with spelling during drafting.
Weekly Writer's Blogs: Building a Reflective Community of Support
Students explore the conventions of blog writing while using it to self-reflect on their writing and communicate with classmates about each other's reflections.
Get the GIST: A Summarizing Strategy for Any Content Area
GIST is a summarizing technique that can be used in any content area. Students will learn and apply the strategy while doing online research and writing activities on news stories.
Flip-a-Chip: Examining Affixes and Roots to Build Vocabulary
Do your students detest having to define vocabulary words? Don"t confine them to worksheets—turn the study of affixes and roots into a hands-on contest to create context-rich vocabulary puzzles.
Using QARs to Develop Comprehension and Reflective Reading Habits
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.
Choosing, Chatting, and Collecting: Vocabulary Self-Collection Strategy
Students identify interesting words from Shakespeare's plays and add them to a classroom vocabulary collection.
Tell Me Your Story: Video-Inspired Vocabulary Writing
Students watch a sample of artistic video clips online and respond through creative writing while using the vocabulary words they are currently studying.
Show-Me Sentences
This lesson teaches students how to revise dull "telling" sentences into vivid, descriptive "showing" sentences.
Creating an Online Community Through Electronic Portfolios
Students publish their work in an electronic portfolio, which enables them to respond to each other's content online.
Guided Comprehension in Action: Teaching Summarizing With the Bio-Cube
Students learn the ins and outs of writing biographies by researching a contemporary or historical figure and writing a summary.
Using a Word Journal to Create a Personal Dictionary
Students will be the definition of vocabulary experts as they use the skills they learn in this lesson to track, define, and ultimately master unfamiliar words.