Reading Strand

At a young age, it is very important for students to focus on developing their skills and knowledge to help them become successful readers. Reading is a skill that we consistently use in our daily lives and we want our students to be able to read with confidence and possess the ability to comprehend the information encountered and realize the relevancy of what it is that they are reading.  As teachers we want to install a growth mindset in our classroom to help our students realize the importance of reading. We have to convince them that reading can be a great source to dig into your imagination and discover new worlds and experiences that they may have no been aware of before. These experiences can help develop their proficiency and improve their reading habits with a little bit of practice.

The website www.readwritethink.org is a great resource for teachers to use to find many different sources and strategy guides to help teacher with their professional development to educate students with their reading comprehension. This site has lesson plans, printouts, strategy guides, videos, and professional library’s to assist teachers with all of their educational needs.

There are many expectations that can be met with this resource. I was amazing at how in depth some of these instructional plans were. I analyzed an instructional plan for supporting student comprehension in the content area of reading. This strategy guide takes a different approach to help students focus on what is most important in what they are reading and offer students meaningful ways to respond to and to make sense of what they are reading so students can engage themselves in reading with confidence. One strategy that they suggest to improve students reading comprehension is to have the students group in pairs and have them read silently or aloud. Then, once they both reach an agreed upon reading spot, they come together and ask each other questions and discuss what they have just read. I thought that this was a very effective strategy because it allows students to collaborate and reflect on what they just reading so that they can determine what is important and retain the particular information at a greater success.

Another strategy from this instructional plan that I thought was extremely effective was to have students reflect on what they have just read through informal writing such as writing a journal entry after they had read the specific content. It is important to have them write about what they have just read because the content is fresh in their mind and they are more likely to be able to express the information that just received sooner, rather than later. Teachers could also have the students write a few key ideas from the reading on a cue, so that can help students construct meaning behind what they are reading and practice with their cue cards. I can see myself using this strategy in the classroom because having students collaboratively reading allows them to recognize the text and communicate their understand of the text, which is an important part of reading expectations for students.  Also, this strategy helps students identify their strengths as readers and give them the change to work on improvement areas.

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