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. (continue reading)
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. (continue reading)
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. (continue reading)
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. (continue reading)
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. (continue reading)
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. (continue reading)
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. (continue reading)
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. (continue reading)
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. (continue reading)
