K-12 For Educators

Graphic organizers are a great way to help students make meaningful connections with the material they are learning in class. A visual, cross-subject guide is a helpful resource that allows...

Scaffolding in reading is similar to scaffolding in building. Scaffolds brace the building and allow workers access when a structure is being erected; scaffolds in reading support learning and...

The population of English as a Second Language (ESL) learners is increasing in today's classrooms. With this change comes the challenge of how to effectively meet the needs of studentes whose...

Semantic webbing is a strategy for reading instruction that enables students to activate their prior knowledge about a subject before reading a text. Semantic webbing is also known as concept...

Students are often assigned books to read and report on that they find inaccessible. Either they aren’t interested in the main character, or the story doesn’t seem interesting, but often they...

Before beginning a shared reading session, the teacher can preview the text the class will read together. It may be a large story book that the teacher reads and displays as she goes, or it may be...

Connections are important to young students because they help make meaning out of the abstract. When kids can connect concepts and ideas to their own worlds, their depth of knowledge and learning...

Dyslexia is a neurological disorder that affects language processing. Students with dyslexia have problems with reading and writing. Although no two dyslexic students have the identical problems...

Elementary students have to understand and apply reading comprehension skills in order to read for meaning. Reading skills can be taught in isolation, but need to be practiced in real reading...

Sight words are words that appear frequently in written text and are considered necessary to decipher meaning from the written word. Although some sight words can be decoded by letter-sound...

While many children possess the ability to read a book, fewer know how to truly comprehend what they read. Regardless of what content area you teach, your goal should be to promote comprehension...

Reading skills are taught through teacher modeling and student practice. The skills that are most essential for comprehension are predicting, inferring, questioning, retelling, and summarizing....

Teacher web pages are used to communicate with both parents and students. They serve as an organizational tool, a reflection of the teacher, a resource for communication and an opportunity for...

Media Smart aims at teaching media literacy skills using advertising as a vehicle. Four pillars of media literacy that Media Smart applies to advertising are: production: who produced this text,...

Reading activity sheets help students comprehend what they read. Meaningful activity sheets help them remember the important pieces of information or learn new vocabulary words. They can also be...

Speed reading is a beneficial skill to have as a child or adult. It can help you read books, articles, textbooks and information at high speeds, helping you finish faster and more efficiently. It...

If there's one thing that all grade school students know these days, it's graphic organizers. They use them to organize ideas---ideas that they've read in a text, ideas that they want to write...

Making inferences in reading is a crucial skill that must be mastered for a reader to have real comprehension. Making inferences involves reading the text and recalling prior experiences that are...

Learning thrives on structure, and one way to increase reading comprehension is to teach students about text structures that they are certain to encounter when reading. When students know what to...

Cell phones can be an excellent educational tool to teach any subject. I teach adult immigrants English as a Second Language. Most of my students do not have a computer or Internet access at home,...

It may seem a simple task for students to write a summary of a particular chapter in a book for homework, but unless they are first shown how to select relevant material, they seldom know how to...

Reading comprehension is an ongoing process and is improved greatly whenever a student advances from the basic skill of fact recall to critically thinking. As a parent or reading teacher, there...

Make a teacher's newsletter to communicate important information to your students and parents. Create an original newsletter from scratch and save it as a template, if you desire, so that you can...

Despite parents' and teachers' best efforts, many teenagers don't want to read. But if you watch carefully, you will see a large portion of the teenage population reading---and comprehending what...

Every school has at least one: the cool, well loved teacher. To be a great teacher, you don't have to wear costumes to school and act as well as a Broadway star. Great teachers provide firm, clear...

The Socratic Method is used in seminars and many classrooms today. It is a form of discussion that allows all ideas to be discussed through open dialogue. For it to be successful in the...

Creative writing is one of the best techniques to get students engaged in a text. The RAFT activity encourages your students to visualize themselves as the fictional or historical characters in...

Prereading strategies connect students to the text before they begin reading. During-reading and postreading strategies keep students engaged in the material as they read. The KWL reading strategy...

Lower-performing ESL (English as a Second Language) students struggle to acquire the standard proficiency of reading and writing. When preparing lessons, teachers should accommodate all levels of...

Plagiarism is a real threat to academia. Students resort to plagiarizing text for many reasons, not the least of which is easy access to different papers on the Internet. Read the following tips...

Students - and some teachers - think that sound reading skills are not necessary in all subjects. Even though you may not be an English teacher, reading needs to happen right across the...

Teaching reading should be done in a quiet supportive atmosphere, especially with children with learning disabilities. Research has shown that soft music in the background is conducive to...

Second grade is very exciting, because most children make the transition from "learning to read to reading to learn." They no longer have to concentrate exclusively on decoding and sounding our...

To use a guided reading to teach a lesson, there are several things you must do. You must know the material the class will be reading, create a guided reading worksheet, and be able to maintain...

A cloze or cloze passage is a reading strategy that increases reading comprehension. A cloze passage is a piece of text in which words have been omitted throughout. A teacher's objective in...

Teach your students the parts of speech in a more creative way by encouraging them to focus on content. All too often, teachers hand out lists of nouns, adjectives or verbs and instruct students...

Picture books are not just usable tools in elementary schools. There are a number of complex reading and writing strategies that come from picture books that are useful in the secondary classroom....