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Check out these strategies for vocabulary to use WITH technology!

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Check out these strategies for vocabulary to use WITH technology!

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Words2Reading

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What would increase the rigor of this lesson? 

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What would increase the rigor of this lesson? 

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- Asking for the sound the letter makes
- Have students to air write the letter as they say the sound

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georgia early learning and development standards

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Georgia Early Learning and Development Standards (GELDS)

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Early Reading: With prompting and support, recognizes and names some upper/lowercase letters of the alphabet.

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X-O-Let's Go: Partner Strategy to check for understanding

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X-O-Let's Go: Partner Strategy to check for understanding

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Teachings Students to Read Metacognitively 

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Teachings Students to Read Metacognitively 

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A mini-lesson and anchor chart for showing early elementary students how to monitor their comprehension as they read.

©Shutterstock/Sergey Nivens

Comprehension is, of course, the whole point of reading. As proficient readers read, they make meaning, learn new information, connect with characters, and enjoy the author's craft. But as students begin to transition in their skills from cracking the sound-symbol code to becoming active meaning makers, they do not always monitor their understanding of the text as they read or notice when they make errors.

There are several categories of errors that students tend to make as they read. They may insert words where they don't belong, substitute words as they read (this tends to happen with smaller sight words-reading the as a), make phonetic errors, or omit words completely. They may also make fluency-related errors, such as not attending to punctuation, which can lead to confusion about which character is speaking, for example.

Sometimes a student's error will change the meaning of the text, and other times it won't. But it remains true that the fewer the errors, the greater the child's comprehension will be.

When students actively monitor their comprehension, they catch themselves when they make an error and apply a strategy to get their understanding back on track. Monitoring comprehension is a critical skill for both students who are still learning to decode and those who have become proficient decoders but are not yet actively making meaning while they read.

Using Metacognition to Teach Monitoring

When students use metacognition, they think about their thinking as they read. This ability to think about their thinking is critical for monitoring comprehension and fixing it when it breaks down.

When I introduce the concept of metacognition to young children, we talk about the voice in our head that talks back to us while we think and dream. We talk about how this voice also talks back to the story while we read. As we read, thoughts bubble up for us, and it's important to pay attention to these thoughts. When we're reading and understanding a story, we talk about how our minds feel good. When we don't understand a story, our minds have another feeling entirely.

Mini-Lesson on Monitoring

I teach a mini-lesson that has proved effective in helping my third-grade students understand what monitoring comprehension feels like. I use the poem "Safety Pin" by Valerie Worth, which describes this common object, without naming it, by comparing it with a fish and a shrimp-and I don't reveal the title to the students at first. (The Emily Dickinson poem "I like to see it lap the Miles" can be used with middle and high school students.)

After we read the poem, I ask, "What do you think this is about? What words in the poem make you think that? What do you picture as you read it?" The students generally say they think it's about a fish or other aquatic animal, and I try to steer them away from these ideas by pointing out other lines in the poem that contradict that image.

After gathering their ideas, I delve a little deeper in my questions, and we discuss how their minds felt when they heard the poem. Most of them say that it felt uncomfortable not to fully understand the poem. I explain to them that something similar happens when we read and make mistakes, or read something that's too difficult so that we don't fully understand: Our minds simply do not feel good.

I then reveal the poem's title and pass out some safety pins, and we reread the poem together. Many of the students find the reveal to be terribly funny. We discuss how our brains feel after learning what the subject of the poem is. I emphasize that as readers, it's important for us to pay attention to how our brains feel so that we can make sure we truly understand what we're reading.

Charting It

After this mini-lesson, I share with my students an anchor chart I made based on ideas in the book Growing Readers by Kathy Collins. It has the following questions for students to ask themselves as they read: Does it look right and sound right? Can I picture the story? Can I retell the story? Does my mind feel good?
Courtesy of Brooke MacKenzie
The bottom of the chart outlines what students can do if the answer to any of these questions is no: Slow down, re-read, sound it out, and read on.

I have students practice monitoring with their independent reading books and a pile of sticky notes. If something doesn't make sense, and they've tried re-reading, they jot a note on a sticky and later discuss what was confusing with their partners or me. I've found that through conferring with students about their independent reading, and giving them support and feedback during small group sessions, I'm able to guide them to develop their monitoring skills more fully.

Monitoring comprehension can be a complicated skill for some students-it requires a lot of practice, and teacher modeling is critical. But the effort does pay off.

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Teaching Students to Read Metacognitively

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A mini-lesson and anchor chart for showing early elementary students how to monitor their comprehension as they read. ©Shutterstock/Sergey Nivens Comprehension is, of course, the whole point of reading. As proficient readers read, they make meaning, learn new information, connect with characters, and enjoy the author's craft.

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Ideas for scaffolding paraphrasing so that students correctly learn this valuable but difficult-to-master skill.

When discussing text in the classroom, it's tough for students to shift from utilizing an author's words (copying) to accepting the challenge to express that author's idea in their own words (paraphrasing).

But teaching effective paraphrasing is necessary because the use of paraphrasing facilitates important literacy skills: It encourages repeated reading, develops note-taking habits as students track quotes and outline text details, and expands vocabulary as they consider appropriate ways to describe the original text. The skill may seem daunting to students because it takes time to find the appropriate words to reshape a sentence, but that is time well spent.

We also need to teach paraphrasing, of course, so that students develop the skill set required to avoid committing plagiarism unintentionally.

Student Tools

One way to support students is to make them aware of tools that may help when they're paraphrasing. Think of these as training wheels-students won't use them forever.

Academic Phrasebank: Ready-made phrases help students organize their sentences when they paraphrase. The site provides sentence starters for defining ideas, comparing and contrasting ideas, describing cause and effect, and explaining evidence to support statements.

For instance, if a student were paraphrasing vocabulary word X, they would be able to find sentence starters such as "The word X encompasses...," "The word X is challenging to define because...," and "The word X is intended to...."

Ashford University Writing Center: This website has a five-item quiz to review the paraphrasing process. It allows students to identify examples and non-examples of paraphrasing for a given text.

When examining non-examples, students are shown how replacing or rearranging words is akin to copying and pasting on a computer. Students see examples of effective paraphrasing, including a change of sentence structure or personal elaboration combined with limited quoted information.

Tone Analyzer: This tool allows students to enter a brief sample from a text and receive an analysis of the tone. When using this tool, students can request an assessment of whether the text illustrates anger, joy, sadness, etc. In addition to these emotions, the website includes language descriptors such as confident (used to describe texts that use active voice and/or words such as will, must, etc.) or tentative (texts with words such as seems, appears, might, etc.). This tool is useful in helping students successfully align the tone of their paraphrased material with the tone of the original text.

Student Self-Check Prompts

Students should outgrow the tools above, and teachers can encourage that growth by showing them how to monitor their own progress with paraphrasing. Students can self-check to determine how on track with paraphrasing they are by asking themselves these questions:

Can I identify elements of the text that are most significant (and thus appropriate to preserve) when I put it in my own words?

Can I recite elements of the text from memory in order to prepare to put it into my own words?

How can I adjust the sentence structure to preserve the meaning of the text?

Student Cautions

Because the journey to paraphrasing may involve a few hiccups, it's a good idea to identify potential student challenges. When paraphrasing, remind students that they should:

Attempt to describe the text in their own words gradually, one component at a time (thanks to Doug Lemov and Maggie Johnson for this close reading strategy). For instance, they might first use their own words to describe significant phrases in the reading, and then make an effort to explain one or two key sentences, and finally attempt to paraphrase an entire paragraph.

Monitor the similarities between the text and the paraphrase. For instance, after describing specific sentences or paragraphs, they should note how many words are shared. Instead of using the same words as the author, focus on mirroring the same main idea. The Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning at Yale offers easy-to-follow models for how to achieve this.

Ensure that there is a sufficient number of word substitutions in the paraphrased material. (Substituting only a couple of words could constitute plagiarism.) Students should focus on changing the structure of the sentence. This may involve converting a simple sentence to a compound sentence or adding a prepositional phrase.

Avoid adjusting special language (acronyms, figurative language, jargon, etc.). These kinds of terms are considered common knowledge, so using them in a paraphrase doesn't constitute plagiarism. Resources such as the Purdue Online Writing Lab can help students figure out whether a particular term is common knowledge.

Teachers can push students to move beyond copying by encouraging them to see paraphrasing as the go-to reading response. When we equip students with needed resources, we make student voice the rule instead of the exception.

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Ideas for scaffolding paraphrasing so that students correctly learn this valuable but difficult-to-master skill. When discussing text in the classroom, it's tough for students to shift from utilizing an author's words (copying) to accepting the challenge to express that author's idea in their own words (paraphrasing).