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Dictionary.com | Meanings & Definitions of English Words

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The world's leading online dictionary: English definitions, synonyms, word origins, example sentences, word games, and more. A trusted authority for 25+ years!

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This helps find synonyms and antonyms of words.

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Thesaurus.com - The world’s favorite online thesaurus!

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Thesaurus.com is the world’s largest and most trusted online thesaurus for 25+ years. Join millions of people and grow your mastery of the English language.

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This can help with any word and works both English->Spanish and Spanish->English.

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Google’s service, offered free of charge, instantly translates words, phrases, and web pages between English and over 100 other languages.

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Watch the video, learn the vocab, and write your own rhymes in the Lyric Lab!

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Inferencing - Inference Worksheets - Flocabulary

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Learn how to use clues to infer information with Flocabulary’s educational rap song and lesson plan.

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Here are some websites that will help all types of learners make this unit easier!

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Copy and paste articles here to get only the most important information and read LESS!

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SMMRY - Summarize articles, text, websites, essays and documents

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Summarize articles, text, websites, essays and documents for free with SMMRY

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Practice making inferences with these fun games!

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Please listen!

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Rap video about note-taking

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Note-Taking Methods - Common Core Standards ELA - Cornell Note Taking System - Flocabulary

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Learn three different methods for taking notes with Flocabulary's educational rap song and lesson plan.

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Learn the Unit Vocabulary

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Play at your own pace!

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Join a game of kahoot here. Kahoot! is a free game-based learning platform that makes it fun to learn - any subject, in any language, on any device, for all ages!

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Please listen!

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Inferences Extra Practice

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Find and create gamified quizzes, lessons, presentations, and flashcards for students, employees, and everyone else. Get started for free!

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Inferences | Making Inferences | Award Winning Inferences Teaching Video | What is an inference?

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An active reading strategy for articles or textbooks is annotation. Think for a moment about what that word means. It means to add notes (an-NOTE-tate) to text that you are reading, to offer explanation, comments or opinions to the author's words. Annotation takes practice, and the better you are at it, the better you will be at reading complicated articles.

Where to Make Notes

First, determine how you will annotate the text you are about to read.

If it is a printed article, you may be able to just write in the margins. A colored pen might make it easier to see than black or even blue.

If it is an article posted on the web, you could also you , which is a highlighting and annotating tool that you can use on the website and even share your notes with your instructor. Other note-taking plug-ins for web browsers might serve a similar function.

If it is a textbook that you do not own (or wish to sell back), use post it notes to annotate in the margins.

You can also use a notebook to keep written commentary as you read in any platform, digital or print. If you do this, be sure to leave enough information about the specific text you're responding to that you can find it later if you need to. (Make notes about page number, which paragraph it is, or even short quotes to help you locate the passage again.)

What Notes to Make

Now you will annotate the document by adding your own words, phrases, and summaries to the written text. For the following examples, the article " Guinea Worm Facts " was used.

1. Scan the document you are annotating. Some obvious clues will be apparent before you read it, such as titles or headers for sections. Read the first paragraph. Somewhere in the first (or possibly the second) paragraph should be a BIG IDEA about what the article is going to be about. In the margins, near the top, write down the big idea of the article in your own words. This shouldn't be more than a phrase or a sentence. This big idea is likely the article's thesis.

2. Underline topic sentences or phrases that express the main idea for that paragraph or section. You should never underline more than 5 words, though for large paragraphs or blocks of text, you can use brackets. (Underlining long stretches gets messy, and makes it hard to review the text later.) Write in the margin next to what you've underlined a summary of the paragraph or the idea being expressed.

3. Connect related ideas by drawing arrows from one idea to another. Annotate those arrows with a phrase about how they are connected.

4. If you encounter an idea, word, or phrase you don't understand, circle it and put a question mark in the margin that indicates an area of confusion. Write your question in the margin.
"Depending on the outcome of the assessment, the commission recommends to WHO which formerly endemic countries should be declared free of transmission, i.e., certified as free of the disease." -> ?? What does this mean? Who is WHO?

5. Anytime the author makes a statement that you can connect with on a personal level, annotate in the margins a summary of how this connects to you. Write any comments or observations you feel appropriate to the text. You can also add your personal opinion.
"Guinea worm disease incapacitates victims for extended periods of time making them unable to work or grow enough food to feed their families or attend school." -> My dad was sick for a while and couldn't work. This was hard on our family.

6. Place a box around any term or phrase that emphasizes scientific language. These could be words you are not familiar with or will need to review later. Define those words in the margins.
"Guinea worm disease is set to become the second human disease in history, after smallpox, to be eradicated." -> Eradicated = to put an end to, destroy

To summarize how you will annotate text:

1. Identify the BIG IDEA
2. Underline topic sentences or main ideas
3. Connect ideas with arrows
4. Ask questions
5. Add personal notes
6. Define technical words

Like many skills, annotating takes practice. Remember that the main goal for doing this is to give you a strategy for reading text that may be more complicated and technical than what you are used to.

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An active reading strategy for articles or textbooks is annotation. Think for a moment about what that word means. It means to add notes (an-NOTE-tate) to text that you are reading, to offer explanation, comments or opinions to the author's words.

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Comprehension: The Goal of Reading

Comprehension, or extracting meaning from what you read, is the ultimate goal of reading. Experienced readers take this for granted and may not appreciate the reading comprehension skills required. The process of comprehension is both interactive and strategic. Rather than passively reading text, readers must analyze it, internalize it and make it their own.

In order to read with comprehension, developing readers must be able to read with some proficiency and then receive explicit instruction in reading comprehension strategies (Tierney, 1982).

​ Strategies for reading comprehension in Read Naturally programs

​General Strategies for Reading Comprehension

The process of comprehending text begins before children can read, when someone reads a picture book to them. They listen to the words, see the pictures in the book, and may start to associate the words on the page with the words they are hearing and the ideas they represent.

In order to learn comprehension strategies, students need modeling, practice, and feedback. The key comprehension strategies are described below.

Using Prior Knowledge/Previewing

When students preview text, they tap into what they already know that will help them to understand the text they are about to read. This provides a framework for any new information they read.

Predicting

When students make predictions about the text they are about to read, it sets up expectations based on their prior knowledge about similar topics. As they read, they may mentally revise their prediction as they gain more information.

Identifying the Main Idea and Summarization

Identifying the main idea and summarizing requires that students determine what is important and then put it in their own words. Implicit in this process is trying to understand the author's purpose in writing the text.

Questioning

Asking and answering questions about text is another strategy that helps students focus on the meaning of text. Teachers can help by modeling both the process of asking good questions and strategies for finding the answers in the text.

Making Inferences

In order to make inferences about something that is not explicitly stated in the text, students must learn to draw on prior knowledge and recognize clues in the text itself.

Visualizing

Studies have shown that students who visualize while reading have better recall than those who do not (Pressley, 1977). Readers can take advantage of illustrations that are embedded in the text or create their own mental images or drawings when reading text without illustrations.

Strategies for Reading Comprehension: Narrative Text

Narrative text tells a story, either a true story or a fictional story. There are a number of strategies that will help students understand narrative text.

Story Maps

Teachers can have students diagram the story grammar of the text to raise their awareness of the elements the author uses to construct the story. Story grammar includes:

Setting: When and where the story takes place (which can change over the course of the story).

Characters: The people or animals in the story, including the protagonist (main character), whose motivations and actions drive the story.

Plot: The story line, which typically includes one or more problems or conflicts that the protagonist must address and ultimately resolve.

Theme: The overriding lesson or main idea that the author wants readers to glean from the story. It could be explicitly stated as in Aesop's Fables or inferred by the reader (more common).

​ Printable story map (blank)

Retelling

Asking students to retell a story in their own words forces them to analyze the content to determine what is important. Teachers can encourage students to go beyond literally recounting the story to drawing their own conclusions about it.

Prediction

Teachers can ask readers to make a prediction about a story based on the title and any other clues that are available, such as illustrations. Teachers can later ask students to find text that supports or contradicts their predictions.

Answering Comprehension Questions

Asking students different types of questions requires that they find the answers in different ways, for example, by finding literal answers in the text itself or by drawing on prior knowledge and then inferring answers based on clues in the text.

Strategies for Reading Comprehension: Expository Text

Expository text explains facts and concepts in order to inform, persuade, or explain.

The Structure of Expository Text

Expository text is typically structured with visual cues such as headings and subheadings that provide clear cues as to the structure of the information. The first sentence in a paragraph is also typically a topic sentence that clearly states what the paragraph is about.

Expository text also often uses one of five common text structures as an organizing principle:

Cause and effect

Problem and solution

Compare and contrast

Description

Time order (sequence of events, actions, or steps)

Teaching these structures can help students recognize relationships between ideas and the overall intent of the text.

Main Idea/Summarization

A summary briefly captures the main idea of the text and the key details that support the main idea. Students must understand the text in order to write a good summary that is more than a repetition of the text itself.

​K-W-L

There are three steps in the K-W-L process (Ogle, 1986):

1. What I Know: Before students read the text, ask them as a group to identify what they already know about the topic. Students write this list in the "K" column of their K-W-L forms.

2. What I Want to Know: Ask students to write questions about what they want to learn from reading the text in the "W" column of their K-W-L forms. For example, students may wonder if some of the "facts" offered in the "K" column are true.

3. What I Learned: As they read the text, students should look for answers to the questions listed in the "W" column and write their answers in the "L" column along with anything else they learn.

After all of the students have read the text, the teacher leads a discussion of the questions and answers.

Printable K-W-L chart (blank)

Graphic Organizers

Graphic organizers provide visual representations of the concepts in expository text. Representing ideas and relationships graphically can help students understand and remember them. Examples of graphic organizers are:
Tree diagrams that represent categories and hierarchies Tables that compare and contrast data Time-driven diagrams that represent the order of events Flowcharts that represent the steps of a process​
​

Teaching students how to develop and construct graphic organizers will require some modeling, guidance, and feedback. Teachers should demonstrate the process with examples first before students practice doing it on their own with teacher guidance and eventually work independently.

Strategies for Reading Comprehension in Read Naturally Programs

Several Read Naturally programs include strategies that support comprehension:

Read Naturally Intervention Program

Strategies for Reading Comprehension

Prediction Step

Retelling Step

Quiz / Comprehension Questions

Graphic Organizers

One Minute Reader Live:
A component of web-based Read Live for supplemental, independent reading that develops fluency with support for vocabulary and comprehension.

Take Aim at Vocabulary: A print-based program with audio CDs that teaches carefully selected target words and strategies for independently learning unknown words. Students work mostly independently or in teacher-led small groups of up to six students.

Main idea

Literal

Vocabulary

Inference

Vocabulary: Clarify target words

Vocabulary: Study word parts and review target words

Vocabulary: Apply the target words

Bibliography

Honig, B., L. Diamond, and L. Gutlohn. (2013). Teaching reading sourcebook, 2nd ed. Novato, CA: Arena Press.

Ogle, D. M. (1986). K-W-L: A teaching model that develops active reading of expository text. The Reading Teacher 38(6), pp. 564-570.

Pressley, M. (1977). Imagery and children's learning: Putting the picture in developmental perspective. Review of Educational Research 47, pp. 586-622.

Tierney, R. J. (1982). Essential considerations for developing basic reading comprehension skills. School Psychology Review 11(3), pp. 299-305.

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To improve comprehension, students must have some reading proficiency and receive explicit instruction in skills and strategies for reading comprehension.