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Find a space in your classroom for a word wall that you can add to as the year progresses. Leave enough space for you and your students to add definitions and examples throughout the year.

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Integrating Literacy Into the Study of the Earth's Surface
Water covers 71% of the earth's surface—does it get the instructional time it deserves in your busy curriculum? Students wade right in to the study of bodies of water as they read and discuss science trade books and work together to develop Readers Theater scripts based on selected titles.
Buzz! Whiz! Bang! Using Comic Books to Teach Onomatopoeia
This lesson is sure to sizzle, not fizzle, as students use comic strips to find onomatopoetic words, develop a vocabulary list from the words, and discuss why writers use onomatopoeia.
Reading, Writing, Haiku Hiking! A Class Book of Picturesque Poems
Students learn haiku
write descriptive poems
and share with the class.

Going on a Shape Hunt: Integrating Math and Literacy
Students participate in a scavenger hunt for shapes; reading, writing, and discussion of shapes encourage literacy and math skills.
Finding Fabulous Financial Literacy Vocabulary With Fancy Nancy
Fancy Nancy teaches fancy words. Did you know Nancy also teaches about fabulous financial literacy concepts? Explore basic economics vocabulary with the entrepreneur extraordinaire!
"America the Beautiful": Using Music and Art to Develop Vocabulary
Students engage in a rich study of vocabulary words from the song "America the Beautiful," using music and art.
Growing Readers and Writers with Help from Mother Goose
Watch Mother Goose work her magic! This lesson uses nursery rhymes to help emergent readers remember the letters and their sounds and identify word chunks.
What's in a Name? Teaching Concepts of Letter and Word
In this recurring activity, the process of choosing a helper for the day becomes a literacy activity, with the helper's name as a starting place for reading and writing.

Weekend News! A Weekly Writing Activity
On Monday mornings, you're likely to be asked, "What did you do this weekend?" In this lesson, students respond to this question in a self-assessed writing assignment about their weekend adventures.
A Race With Grace: Sports Poetry in Motion
In this lesson, athletics, aesthetics, and poetics intersect in new ways as developing literacy learners experiment together with the forms of language.

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Using Word Walls to Develop and Maintain Academic Vocabulary - ReadWriteThink

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Integrating Literacy Into the Study of the Earth's Surface Water covers 71% of the earth's surface-does it get the instructional time it deserves in your busy curriculum? Students wade right in to the study of bodies of water as they read and discuss science trade books and work together to develop Readers Theater scripts based on selected titles.

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While teaching, be sure to occasionally pause and engage students in translating between academic and every day language.

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About Simply Novel

Our Mission

As an innovative leader in the field of educational publishing and media, Simply Novel is committed to providing practical ideas, relevant content, and quality resources to support and connect teachers and to inspire better teaching. Simply Novel provides effective and innovative training, coaching, and resources to help teachers feel inspired and connected to each other and their students in order to generate, support, and retain high-quality teachers in the classroom.

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Translating Hashtags Into Academic Language for the Classroom: Infographic

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As an innovative leader in the field of educational publishing and media, Simply Novel is committed to providing practical ideas, relevant content, and quality resources to support and connect teachers and to inspire better teaching.

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Making your thinking and learning transparent and while you do, talk about how you understand the information.

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Background

Think Alouds help students learn to monitor their thinking as they read an assigned passage. Students are directed by a series of questions which they think about and answer aloud while reading. This process reveals how much they understand a text. As students become more adept at this technique they learn to generate their own questions to guide comprehension.

Benefits

Think Alouds are practical and relatively easy for teachers to use within the classroom. Teachers are able to model the Think Aloud technique and discuss how good readers often re-read a sentence, read ahead to clarify, and/or look for context clues to make sense of what they read. Think alouds slow down the reading process and allow students to monitor their understanding of a text.

Create and use the strategy

Begin by modeling this strategy. Model your thinking as you read. Do this at points in the text that may be confusing for students (new vocabulary, unusual sentence construction). Then introduce the assigned text and discuss the purpose of the Think Aloud strategy. Then develop the set of questions to support thinking aloud (see examples below).

1. What do I know about this topic?

2. What do I think I will learn about this topic?

3. Do I understand what I just read?

4. Do I have a clear picture in my head about this information?

5. What more can I do to understand this?

6. What were the most important points in this reading?

7. What new information did I learn?

8. How does it fit in with what I already know?

Teachers should next (1) give students opportunities to practice the technique, either in pairs, small groups or individually; and (2) offer structured feedback to students.

Initially, the teacher reads the selected passage aloud as the students read the same text silently. At certain points the teacher stops and "thinks aloud" answers to some of the pre-selected questions. Teachers should demonstrate how good readers monitor their understanding by rereading a sentence, reading ahead to clarify, and/or looking for context clues. Students then learn to offer answers to the questions as the teacher leads the Think Aloud strategy. As students become familiar with the Think Aloud process, they may work individually or in small groups. Teachers may choose to have students write down responses to the Think Aloud strategy which provides a record of learning.

Further reading

Davey, B. (1983). Think-aloud: Modeling the cognitive processes of reading comprehension. Journal of Reading, 27(1), 44-47.

Olshavsky, J. E. (1977). Reading as problem-solving: An Investigation of Strategies. Reading Research Quarterly, 12(4), 654-674.

Wilhelm, J. D. (2001). Improving Comprehension with Think-Aloud Strategies. New York: Scholastic Inc.

Wilhelm, J. D. (2008). National Writing Project. Navigating Meaning: Using Think-Alouds to Help Readers Monitor Comprehension. Retrieved 2008, March 5, from http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/495

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Think Alouds help students learn to monitor their thinking as they read an assigned passage. Students are directed by a series of questions which they think about and answer aloud while reading. This process reveals how much they understand a text. As students become more adept at this technique they learn to generate their own questions to guide comprehension.

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Help students get started by providing sentence frames and starters. As students become more confident with using academic language you can encourage them to work independently and draw on what they learned from the frames rather than rely on them.

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Discussion and Supporting Materials

Thought starters

1. Why does Ms. Brewer give students the option of using sentence frames?

2. How can you create a sentence frame that encourages varied responses?

3. What makes sentence frames an effective strategy for English Language Learners?

School Details

Stevenson Elementary School
14220 Ne 8th St
Bellevue WA 98007

Data Provided By:

Teachers

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Using Sentence Frames to Jumpstart Writing

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To help her students get writing, fifth grade teacher Stacy Brewer gives her class sentence frames. The sentence frames help students start writing by providing them with a structure to work with. Stacy describes how this strategy is particularly helpful for English Language Learners because it provides them with language and makes writing less intimidating.