Topic: Reading

When you confer, you tailor your instruction to each student’s strengths and needs. But you do so much more than that. Conferring is where the magic happens. It’s the heartbeat of the literacy block.

While good readers are able to meet state reading standards and often achieve at the highest levels on standardized tests, they can be helped to become more thoughtful readers.

There is a better way than teaching to district assessments and high-stakes college entrance exams. Though we may have to teach a type of formulaic writing, we don’t have to abandon the work that truly matters to our students.

When students write Reading Responses about a text, they have something to say in class. It may be a minor point, or it may be a major point, but it is a concrete thought and it is tied to a specific part of the text.

Our aim should be to ensure that every minute is packed with thinking, reading, writing, lots of talk, and lots of books. To that end we need to reexamine the assumption that students can read only one book at a time.

Reading is a process that is internal, and where the problems lie can seem difficult to pinpoint. Happily, though, for many young readers, once they get focused help working through stuck points, their progress seems to skyrocket.

How do we encourage students to genuinely engage with challenging or difficult texts? Today on the Heinemann Podcast, Marilyn Pryle, author of “Reading with Presence” suggests a method of writing and sharing reading responses, which differ from the usual short essay answer.

Confident readers know how to choose books. Which is not to say that we are immune to error. Every avid reader has experienced book droughts where nothing you pick up has what you are looking for.

Most reading workshop experts suggest that students spend no more than 10% of their reading time writing about reading. During the other 90% of reading time, students should be reading, engrossed in books they can read with a high level of accuracy in order to achieve the kind of reading volume that leads to maximum growth.

When we want nothing from a text but what it might have to offer our minds and spirits on its own terms, we read with presence.

Here, Kate Roberts shares just a few extended classroom clips from her book, A Novel Approach. In this blog, you'll get a chance to watch Kate confer with two different students, and see how Kate structures a mini-less and read aloud.

Before we were teachers, we were readers−readers who understand the power reading has to change our lives from the new characters we meet, the new places we visit, and the new lessons we learn.

A wrap up of the PLC series posts from 2017-18 year.

Whole-class novels can offer a method of teaching that allows us to ignite a sense of community in the classroom.

If you read aloud regularly to your students, you know: there is no time in the day quite like read aloud time. A good read aloud can bring a group together like nothing else, can provide a foundation of camaraderie, trust, and respect in a classroom.

Patricia Vitale-Reilly's book Supporting Struggling Learners: 50 Instructional Moves for the Classroom Teacher provides practical strategies for empowering students with the right tools to grow and learn. In this video, Patricia talks about providing strong study skills.

This book is for teachers who want to revive the art of analytical writing in their classrooms—from teachers of middle-grade writers who are making their first foray into analytical writing to teachers of experienced twelfth-grade writers who are looking ahead to college where their professors will expect much, much more.

The study guide includes easy-to-use worksheets, reflection questions, and workshop strategies to invigorate reading instruction in your classroom and guide students through difficult texts.