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reading strategies

15 Ways to Engage Readers During Your Read-Aloud

by BrainNinjasWP

If your administration thinks reading aloud to your students is a waste of time, you need to read this post full of ways to engage readers and teach your language arts outcomes. It goes far beyond listening skills. Come get a whole bunch of ideas on how to get the most out of your read aloud.

It seems that there is less and less time for reading aloud to your students, but if you use that read-aloud to engage your readers, you can teach so many different skills. Kids (and adults) of all ages love to be read to. If that weren’t the case, there wouldn’t be a thriving industry of audiobooks.

Administrators want teachers to focus their time on literacy and numeracy. Things like read-alouds seem like “entertainment,” but there is so much value in reading aloud to children. Come learn how we turn every read-aloud into a lesson (without our students even knowing it).

[Read more…] about 15 Ways to Engage Readers During Your Read-Aloud

Filed Under: Teaching Strategies Tagged With: books, First Year Teachers, first-year teachers, fluency, Guided Reading, Guided Reading Instruction, Listening Skills, new service teacher, new teacher, new teachers, read aloud, Reading, Reading Activities, reading comprehension, reading strategies

Are You Missing Out on the Love of Drama Circles?

by BrainNinjasWP

Are you missing out on the benefits of using drama circles in your upper elementary classroom? Come learn how to use them to help with listening skills, reading abilities and for the fun of it.

Before learning about drama circles, we weren’t sure how we could incorporate drama into our classroom in a meaningful way that didn’t take away from all the work we needed to do. Putting on a play just didn’t seem like a good use of our learning time, but we knew our students enjoyed acting. That is when we considered some of the benefits of drama circles in our upper elementary classroom.

[Read more…] about Are You Missing Out on the Love of Drama Circles?

Filed Under: Teaching Strategies Tagged With: Classroom Community, Confidence, Drama, Drama Circles, Expression, Listening Skills, Poetry and Drama, read aloud, Reading, Reading Activities, reading comprehension, reading strategies, reluctant readers, Teachers Pay Teachers, Teaching Reading

Amazing Activities Students Can Do Instead of Homework

by BrainNinjasWP

Are you looking for activities your students can do at home instead of homework? We don't assign homework in our upper elementary classroom. Instead, we assign activities and it's been a big hit. Come find out what you activities you can do instead of homework.

We don’t assign formal homework to our students. It’s actually a district policy, but we also don’t believe that homework serves any real purpose other than causing frustration at home and making work for students. Instead, we assign a list of activities students can do at home instead of homework. We get WAY more engagement and everyone loves it.

[Read more…] about Amazing Activities Students Can Do Instead of Homework

Filed Under: Classroom Tips Tagged With: alternative homework, communicating with parents, connecting nature, family, games, guardians, homework, nature, outdoor classroom, parents, Reading, Reading Activities, reading strategies

How to Set Up Your Reading Comprehension Schedule

by BrainNinjasWP

If you use our weekly reading comprehension sets (or maybe you want to learn more), come see how we schedule the first month and get some ideas for how you can use these reading and grammar activities in your classroom whether your instruction happens in the classroom or online.

If you are struggling with reading instruction in your classroom, you’re not alone. Upper elementary teachers are often not trained in how to teach students to read, despite the fact all the students in their classroom are unlikely to be reading at grade level. Setting up a reading comprehension schedule is one way to get on track.

We designed our Weekly Reading Comprehension Skills specifically for our students. We needed reading material for science and social studies that were at the right reading level and needed to teach grammar and reading skills. You might want to read this post about how we came up with them: Add Great Content to Your Literacy Lessons.

[Read more…] about How to Set Up Your Reading Comprehension Schedule

Filed Under: Engaging Lessons, Teaching Strategies Tagged With: distance teaching, Google Apps, Guided Reading, Guided Reading Instruction, Reading, reading comprehension, reading strategies, reluctant readers, Teachers Pay Teachers, Teaching Reading

Add Great Content to Your Literacy Lessons

by BrainNinjasWP

There are so many things to teach and just not enough time for it all. We started using content from science and social studies to teach grammar and reading comprehension. Game changer! Come find out what we did and how we did it in our upper elementary classroom literacy lessons (even during distance teaching).

It took fifteen years of teaching and professional development before we felt confident teaching reading to students in upper elementary. Reading is one of the most important skills any teacher is responsible for, but it is often taught by stabbing at strategies until something works-only to find it doesn’t work for the next student. Literacy lessons were hard to design and we didn’t really know where to start.

The most important thing we’ve learned is that reading comprehension skills are also skills related to grammar, word parts, word families and patterns, and writing. The same skills are used in a variety of ways.

If a student missed one of these skills, they trip over it in everything other subject. By the time students get to the end of Grade Three, if they aren’t reading at grade level, they are statistically unlikely to catch up. So, what is a teacher to do?

[Read more…] about Add Great Content to Your Literacy Lessons

Filed Under: Engaging Lessons, Teaching Strategies Tagged With: grammar, Guided Reading Instruction, Reading, reading comprehension, reading strategies, Teachers Pay Teachers, Teaching Reading, Weekly Reading Skills

How to Run Your Guided Reading Instruction

by BrainNinjasWP

Are you learning to run reading groups in your classroom as part of your reading instruction? Great! Here's what we do during our reading instruction groups in upper elementary.

You’re giving Guided Reading instruction a try. Great! Do you know what you should be doing with your Guided Reading groups and reading instruction? You’re going to teach students to read. But what does that mean?

We teach in upper elementary (usually Grade four or five) which means we have readers in our classroom reading from Grade one through to Grade six. We have English Language Readers, students with learning difficulties, avid readers and all the ones in between. This means we often need to use more than one strategy to teach reading.

[Read more…] about How to Run Your Guided Reading Instruction

Filed Under: Teaching Strategies Tagged With: Guided Reading, Guided Reading Instruction, professional development, Professional Learning, Reading, reading strategies, Teaching Reading

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