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The first pre-reading strategy I chose is called "identify and discuss difficult words, phrases, and concepts in the text" (Texas Education Agency, 2017). This strategy is used during the pre-reading phase during a book introduction to help get a reader's mind ready to read the book. When using this strategy, it is up to the teacher to read and preview the book carefully to identify any words, phrases and/or concepts that could be problematic for the students during their first read through a new book. It is not to say the teacher is going to "warn" the students about each and every possible road block they may encounter while reading the book for the first time, but the teacher would point out any text structures or vocabulary words that would most likely not be part of a student's prior knowledge. This way, students will be mentally prepared when they arrive to this point in the story. It will also help to build a student's confidence and maintain fluency throughout the story which will aid in comprehension. This strategy will work for my students because I have seen its successful use with my current students. We have had several collaboration meetings throughout the year with our literacy team at our school. We have discussed how we can best help our struggling readers so they can move towards reading independence. Identifying and discussing and unusual text structures and vocabulary words has been very helpful when working with my struggling readers for many reasons. One of these reasons is that some students have been identified as having receptive or expressive language difficulties and reviewing certain language structures before reading the book has helped prepare them. Another reason is that many students are unfamiliar with certain vocabulary words due to lack of prior knowledge. The students that will benefit most from this pre-reading strategy are my lower achieving students. Many times when these students are given a new book to read, even at their independent level, they can struggle the first read through due to language difficulties and/or very little background knowledge related to the content in the book.
When teaching this strategy to my students, I will use it during our guided reading groups. When pulling a new book at their instructional level, I will carefully read through it to identify any phrases, language structures and/or vocabulary words that may be difficult. I will take into account the students within that group and if they struggle with language structure and/or vocabulary words, that will help me identify specific parts of the story that need to be previewed first. I will assess the effectiveness of this strategy by taking anecdotal notes while students are reading. While taking these notes, I will be looking to see how students perform when they get to the parts in the story that we have previewed. I will also take notes on strategies that the students used to work through the identified parts of the story in order to build upon the strengths or use it as a teaching point after reading.

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The second pre-reading strategy I chose is "exploring prior knowledge that is relevant to the text" (Rhode Island Department of Education, 2017). This is different than the strategy mentioned above because it is helping draw out what the student may or may not already know about the topic, whether it is informational or narrative. Evaluating and exploring a child's prior knowledge when reading means that the teacher introduces the topic to the children which they will be reading about. Then the teacher asks questions to each student related to the topic at hand. For example, if students were reading about characters going to a birthday party where there were games, cake and presents, a teacher may ask "Who has had a birthday party before with their friends? What did you do at that party? When was a time you were invited to a birthday party?  Did you get a present for the person at the party?"  The discussion could extend from there depending on each student's response.  This strategy will work for my students because it will help students get their minds ready and prepared to read the story.  By activating their prior knowledge through pre-reading discussions, students can begin to think of words and concepts that relate to the book as they are reading.  This will help them to have better accuracy, fluency and comprehension.  Almost all students in my class could benefit from this strategy.  There is only so much information that students can garner from looking at the front cover, back cover and doing a quick flip through the book.  Pre-reading discussions and connections with prior knowledge would be longer for lower readers and shorter for higher readers as they would not need it as much.
When teaching this strategy to my students, I will need to adjust my prior knowledge questions based on if the book is narrative or informational. If the book was informational and about something such as animal habitats, I would ask questions such as "What are some animals that live outside? People live in apartments or houses, what is it called where these animals live? What does it look like?". If the story was narrative, I would ask situational questions such as the ones mentioned in the first paragraph of this post about the birthday party. When assessing the effectiveness of this strategy with my students, I would stop at certain points throughout the story to have the student make text-to-self connections. If they are able to do this effectively and successfully, I will know that discussing the book beforehand and activating the prior knowledge of the student, was helpful in aiding their comprehension while reading it.

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The second post-reading comprehension strategy I chose is called "QAR - question - answer - relationship" (Gunning, 2016, pp. 312-313). The QAR strategy is helpful when answering "out of text" questions. Gunning explains how "some students are text-bound and may not realize that answers to some questions require putting together several pieces of information from reading or using their background of experience plus that information to draw inferences" (p. 312).  Gunning explains there are four levels "based on where the answers are found: 1.) Right there - the answer     is found within a single sentence in the text. 2.) Put together  - The answer is found in several sentences in the text. 3.) On my own - The answer is in the student's background of knowledge.  4.) Writer and me - A combination of information from the text and the reader's background is required to answer the question" (p. 313).  I truly believe this post-reading strategy will work with my students because many times when asked a question about a story or part of story they have just read, they immediately repeat a small piece of text, give a one-word answer or open the book up right away to find the answer without truly thinking first.  I want to help my students understand that they need to pull together pieces of information (just like the 'during reading' strategy of inferencing explained in one of the above posts) to answer the question; this could mean information from the text or not.  I believe the students in my classroom who could benefit most from from the post-reading strategy of QAR would be my mid-level reading ability and higher level reading ability students.  This is because these students tend to bring more background knowledge and have higher-order thinking skills which can therefore form better connections with the ideas and events in a story.  It is not to say that the lower-level reading students could not use this strategy, it would just need to be modified to fit their reading abilities and text level.
This strategy may be difficult for students at first, seeing as how there are four different levels of QAR questions based on where the answers can be found in the text. My first step would be to explain that the QAR comprehension strategy is just another way to understand out story better. With new concepts, it is helpful that my first graders have the language be put into simple terms, while still getting the point across. Then, I would take time throughout the week to model the QAR strategy in its entirety by reading the same story throughout the week, but asking four types of questions based on the four levels as explained in Gunning (2016).  Trying to explain and model all four levels at once would be very overwhelming and above my students' comprehension abilities for learning new information.  When assessing the effectiveness of this strategy, it would have to be done over time.  This is because I would not want to ask a question about a story just to ask it. The question should have a purpose in aiding a student's comprehension and helping to further their knowledge about a story they just read. I could create a table within a document which has each student's name in the far left column and then across the top row would be the four different levels. Then, as I read with students and asked them different types of questions, I would put a check mark or make certain types of notes in each box so as to indicate whether the student was able to demonstrate the comprehension skill independently or if they needed prompting from me.

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Gunning, T. G. (2016). Creating literacy instruction for all students. United States of America: Pearson.

Rhode Island Department of Education. (2017). "Pre-reading strategies and the common core state standards". Retrieved from http://www.ride.ri.gov/Portals/0/Uploads/Documents/Common-Core/Pre-Reading-PowerPoint.pdf

Texas Education Agency. (2017). "Strategies that promote comprehension". Retrieved from http://www.readingrockets.org/article/strategies-promote-comprehension

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The first "post-reading" comprehension strategy that I have chosen is "summarizing" (Gunning, 2016, p. 309).  Summarizing is defined as "defining main ideas and supporting details" (p. 309) which helps to improve "comprehension and increases retention" (p. 309).  This post-reading strategy can be related to retelling in a sense that when finished reading a story and sharing it with someone else, they will not explain every little detail, but they will summarize the main ideas and important details in the story.  This strategy will work with my students because, as first graders, my students tend to tell stories that are very long and sometimes do not really have a point to them.  While it is wonderful they want to share stories, summarizing will be helpful to them to help improve their communication skills when sharing personal stories or sharing information about a book they have read.  I believe all students in my class, including the lowest and highest, can benefit from this comprehension strategy.  The lower students may have an easier time because their stories will not have as many different events or details.  It may be even more helpful for the higher students because I feel at times, these students think reading the book as quickly and accurately as they can is the point of reading.  Summarizing will help them to slow down and pay attention to specific events and details.
Teaching this strategy to my students can be fun and interactive. I can use this strategy whole-group during our read aloud time each day (which would be helpful when introducing it) and I can also use this strategy during guided reading groups. I can use graphic organizers tailored to each group's reading level and skill ability, as well as the type of text being read, to help organize the group's ideas. As students become more confident with this comprehension skill, I could add graphic organizers to their interactive reading journals that they could then keep with them during their individual reading time. To evaluate the effectiveness of this comprehension strategy, I would wait until students have had ample practice with this during whole group and guided reading group. As I mentioned above, I would create interactive reading journals for students with graphic organizers in which they could summarize any of the books they have read in their individual reading baskets. Through looking at each child's reading journals, I will be able to assess how independent each student is with using this strategy to improve their comprehension. If I noticed that students were having difficulty, I would return to modeling and demonstrating this skill within small group reading. I would not model it again whole-group because all students may not need a reteaching of this skill.

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During Reading Comprehension Strategy #2

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During Reading Comprehension Strategy #2

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The second comprehension strategy I chose to use for the "during reading" phase was "inferencing" (Gunning, 2016, p. 311). Gunning describes two different types of inferencing. When explaining "schema-based inferencing" (p. 311) he explains "schema-based inferences allow the reader to elaborate on the text by adding information that has been implied by the author" (p. 311) and "a text-based inference is one that requires putting together two ore more pieces of information from the text" (p. 311).  This will be appropriate for "during reading" because if students were to wait until after they have finished reading, the pieces of information they could infer from, may be too overwhelming. This strategy will work with my students because it will help them engage with the text rather than become passive readers who only answer simple, text-based questions such as who the characters were, what the setting was and what the problem and solution were.  While reading a narrative story, there will be many opportunities for me to stop the students and ask questions that would elicit one of the two types of inferences described above.  I believe that all students would benefit from this strategy except for the readers who may be at a Level A or B (according to the Fountas & Pinnell leveling system we use) because there tends to not be a narrative storyline with simple and non-complex text structures such as are contained in those books.
In terms of teaching this comprehension skill to my students, I believe a lot of modeling will need to be done first with both types of inferencing explained above. I would relate inferencing to completing a puzzle (something they like to do and are familiar with). I would explain that when were infer, we are taking specific pieces of a story and putting them together to create an idea or prediction of sorts.  Then I would read a short story and write on a whiteboard 2-3 pieces of information that I learned from the story and then demonstrate how I put them together to infer something about the book.  I would model and explain how it could be done for narrative and informational books.  Evaluating the effectiveness of this strategy while students are reading the book may be more difficult because each student could use different pieces of information to infer different things.  Therefore, I would need to use anecdotal notes to remember things such as "What pieces of information were used to infer?  Did students come to a logical inference based on the pieces of information chosen?" and questions such as those.  Based on my notes, I may need to do more modeling myself, or have other students, who are successful with the skill, model for the class.

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During Reading Comprehension Strategy #1

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During Reading Comprehension Strategy #1

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The first comprehension strategy that I chose to use for the "during reading" phase of working with my students is "sequencing" (Gunning, 2017, p. 308).  I believe this strategy would benefit the students in my class who are reading at higher levels and whose books contain many events and characters.  The comprehension strategy of sequencing is when students organize details and events of a story sequentially (p. 308).  This strategy would be particularly useful when reading books which contain historical events because "some details have to be comprehended and then remembered in certain order" (p. 308).  This strategy will work with my students because, when reading narrative chapter books with my higher students, stoping after each chapter and discussing events in sequential order can help them to make predictions about what will come up in the next chapter.  Writing these events down after each chapter, in order using words such as "first, second, next, then, before, last and after" (p. 308), will also help students to see how the events unfold and stretch across each chapter, which will aid in comprehension of the book in its entirety.  There are many times when there are numerous details within a single chapter that change affect the plot and characters, therefore it is important to ensure that students understand each chapter, before moving on to the next one.
When teaching the strategy to my students, I will have a timeline (for historical books) or a sequencing map for each chapter (for historical books) that students will be able to interact with and write down their understandings after each chapter or event. If the book my students are reading does not fit any of the above descriptions, I will read the book myself and prepare a recording document that would fit the needs of my students and allow itself to be adaptable to the book they are reading. I will help them through this document the first couple of times and then I will have them go into book clubs with a chapter book and have the students work on these together within groups to grow their independence. I will assess the effectiveness of this strategy in two ways. If I am working with the students and this document for recording their thinking after each chapter/event, I will take anecdotal notes on how much prompting is needed from me to remember the main events and details of a story and how they are related to one another. If I find myself having to do a lot of prompting, I know I need to take a pause from this strategy and break down the chapter further, meaning stoping throughout the chapter, not just at the end of it. I will also evaluate what they are writing down on their recording sheet so as to assess if they could identify the events as they have happened in order, according to their sequence in the book. This will tell me whether the students were able to not only identify the main events, but to put them in sequential order so anyone who reads their document, would be able to understand the gist of the story.