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Description: This is a comprehension strategy where students will read the beginning sentences from a book then will be making predictions about the book.
Advantages: This strategy helps students focus their attention on the book, poem, or play with what they can tell on the first lines.
Disadvantages: Students might not be able to grasp what is going to happen by the first line and this can cause they to become confused throughout the entire book they are reading.
ELLS: ELL students can use this strategy to help them figure out how to make predictions correctly while reading and fully understanding the concepts that are happening.

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Description: Students repeat in their own words a story by using this strategy. There are fingers and each finger has a meaning: setting, characters, problem, events/episodes, and ending/solution.
Advantages: By retelling a story in the students own words, they will be able to make connections to things they know and understand. This is a critical key point for comprehension.
Disadvantages: Some students may have some trouble communicating in their own words and all the details from the story.
ELLS: These students can use this as a guide to help them understand how to correctly summarize and retell a story.

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This graphic organizer can help your children retell any story that they read. The graphic organizer has visual prompts to help the children identify each one of the five parts, as well as a checklist for children to check out when they identify a part.

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Description: This strategy helps students stay engaged within the text. The students will come up with questions to ask the author and the text. Using questions like:" What is the authors message?", "Does the author explain this clearly?"
Advantages: This engages the students in the reading so they can fully understand the text. Helps the students strategy of critiquing someone else's writing.
Disadvantages: If students do not know this strategy they might not understand fully what questions they are needing to answer.
ELLS: Students that are learning english can figure out how to correctly critique someones writing by having correct questions to ask with an outline to use.

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Description: Student will be using all five senses when describing a person, place, or thing in a story. Making the story more interesting with larger descriptive words to make the story more engaging.
Advantage: Helps the students writing to be more interesting by using new vocabulary. Helps the student clarify their understanding of their thinking.
Disadvantage: Some students might not know enough descriptive words to help their writing or might not be able to write as clearly as they can speak.
ELLS: An ELL student may not know exactly what the words truly mean, can have trouble writing what they are thinking but this can help them use either the computer or dictionary to seek new words and find new definitions.

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Descriptive Writing - Defintion, Techniques & Examples | English@Edurite.com

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Descriptive writing is a type of writing that gives clear and concise description of a place, people, object or an event. Read about Types of Descriptive Writing, Techniques & Examples of Descriptive Writing.

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Description: Readers theater is a strategy where students are involved in oral reading to develop fluency within a group. Students do not need to memorize their lines but may need to reread several times.
Advantage: Creates fluency while reading aloud to the class, while building confidence.
Disadvantage: Students who really have a fear with reading aloud might have a breakdown when teacher is making them read in front of the class.
ELLS: Students that are ELLs will be able to listen to the other students read and can try to manipulate the same pronunciation or can get help by the student standing next to them.

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Introduction to Readers' Theatre PowerPoint

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An 11 slide PowerPoint template to use when introducing Readers' Theatre to your students. To download this PowerPoint, head to our website - http://teachstart.co/2kImhV0.

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Description: (I-chart) This is a chart that students can use that can help them gather all types of information about a certain topic from several sources. Teacher will have several questions about the certain topic.
Advantages: This helps with critical thinking and will strengthen reading skills. Also an evaluation tool for the teacher to know how much a student knows about the topic or their interest level about it.
Disadvantages: Making sure the questions were simple enough for each grade level and for each student.
ELLS: Students can use this chart for an overview on how to find information about a topic. Making a topic they will know about and are interested in.

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Traditionally, classrooms in Ontario have followed the rote learning model, which is a technique based on repetition and memorization.

But recently, those classrooms are disappearing in favour of a more collaborative space, in which teachers are facilitators using a technique called inquiry-based teaching.

"Inquiry-based teaching is an approach to instruction that begins with exploring curriculum content and providing a framework for the students to ask their own questions which builds interest and curiosity," says Louise Robitaille , an elementary teacher in Midland.

Encouraging students to be active learners, posing their own questions and problems and following through on those, rather than passive learners simply receiving information is believed to create greater student engagement and, in turn, create greater student achievement.

Inquiry-based learning is not a new idea. It is a teaching method born in the 1960s out of a response to the more traditional forms of teaching. It has steadily gained traction since then.

Ontario has adopted it as a way to reach learners that have traditionally fallen through the cracks of the rote learning model.

WHAT DOES AN INQUIRY-BASED CLASSROOM LOOK LIKE?

The teacher is no longer the "sage on the stage" expounding knowledge for students to memorize. The inquiry-based approach encourages more "student voice and choice" in the learning. This isn't to say that there is no role for rote learning, but rote learning cannot stand on its own.

"There is a minor role for rote learning in the classroom (as) certain skills require long term acquisition," says Robitaille. "However, the focus should always be on expanding knowledge and skills and not on memorization. For example, memorizing history dates without learning the importance of the events is ineffective."

In an inquiry-based classroom, a teacher will work with all of the learning styles found in his or her own classroom and design activities that students can collaborate on in small groups.

However, students may think in ways that are limited to their own experiences, and it is the teacher's job to help kids notice what they might have missed. Teachers also build on spontaneous questions to allow for further thought and questions.

For example, if the classroom is discussing the life of the class goldfish, a child might ask: "If we take out all the plants, will the fish get sick?"

Instead of answering a question like that with a yes or no, the teacher may ask: "What do people think? It might help to first think about what sorts of roles plants carry out? Why are plants in the aquarium important?" These questions would lead students to learn more about aquatic life.

§ Louise Robitaille runs a fantastic site on inquiry-based learning, showing examples of activities in the classroom, and useful tips. You can also follow her on Twitter@robitaille2011

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Traditionally, classrooms in Ontario have followed the rote learning model, which is a technique based on repetition and memorization. But recently, those classrooms are disappearing in favour of a more collaborative space, in which teachers are facilitators using a technique called inquiry-based teaching.

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Description: This is a strategy that is an instructional resource to monitor students fluency improvement.  Repeated readings, under timed conditions, of familiar instructional level text can increase students' reading speed which can improve comprehension.
Advantages: Improves students reading rates and improves reading accuracy, a second aspect of fluency, and leads to improved comprehension.
Disadvantages: Some students might not be able to learn at this rate. Others may not get anything truly out of it to help their fluency.
ELLS: ELL students could really benefit with this strategy if they are truly behind their fluency. This can help them learn english better and can help their reading speed.

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Teach English Writing Fluency

Main Idea

Writing fluency is an important skill that students can develop with frequent practice. ESL students, especially new writers, sometimes hesitate to write for a variety of reasons including lack of practice and fear of errors, among others. Like any skill, the teaching of writing needs to be approached from a variety of angles. This activity - sometimes called Power Writing - takes on one specific objective: developing the ability to produce more output through structured practice involving repeated, timed writing tasks that focus on quantity rather than quality.

A Definition

Writing fluency is the ability to create text without relying too much on memory (Lenski & Verbruggen, 2010). When the performance of specific tasks (e.g. spelling, punctuating a sentence, or ensuring subject-verb agreement) become automatic, ESL students are able to focus their attention on higher order activities such as idea organisation, paragraph cohesion and better word choices. Automatcity is a teaching principle often addressed in the development of speaking and listening skills, but might be overlooked in terms of writing.

Lesson Overview

The idea is to run a Power Writing activity (at least) once a week. Each activity takes about 10 minutes, though the first time it is introduced to the class may require more time to explain the tasks, rationale and outcomes.

Step 1. Write a word or phrase on the whiteboard; it should be related to material recently covered in class.

Step 2. Tell students, "Write as much as you can as well as you can in 60 seconds" on a topic related to the given word/phrase.

Step 3. Call time after one minute. Students stop writing and count the number of words they have written. This number is written down on a recording sheet. Students then read their text looking for errors; errors are circled.

Step 4. Students repeat the 60-second writing exercise with the same prompt, errors corrected. At the end of one minute, they count and record the number of words; read again for errors.

Step 5. Repeat entire process one last time.

Like most fluency activities, this one can yield benefits when performed regularly. Students need to dedicate a place to collect and save their growing number of short texts. In addition, they need to keep a recording sheet for word counts, organized by week.

Some people suggest that word/phrase prompts should be repeated at least once, perhaps two weeks after the initial usage.

Benefits for the Teacher

If run over the course of a semester, students will produce a body work which can be used by the teacher to gain insight into student progress. Indicators of progress might include the number of words written per minute in the first and third iteration. In addition, it might be possible for teachers to compile a list of universal errors that students miss as they edit their own work. These insights could be used to inform future writing lessons by targeting specific needs.

References

Teach writing?

If you like these ideas and want detailed worksheets and lesson ideas for your classroom, buy the ebook Teach Essential Writing Skills. Transform the quality of EFL student writing by focusing on four essential skills. Click here for details about the ebook that should be part of every writing teacher's resource library.

Save time. Teach well.

Cut your lesson prep time with this 240-page collection of ESL resources that stimulate language learning and critical thinking: awesome pair work speaking activities, logic puzzles, trivia, word games and much more. Simplify your lesson planning because teaching should be a joy, not a chore.

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Teach English Writing Fluency Main Idea Writing fluency is an important skill that students can develop with frequent practice. ESL students, especially new writers, sometimes hesitate to write for a variety of reasons including lack of practice and fear of errors, among others. Like any skill, th

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Description: This is a type of graphic organizer that helps the student organize what they know, what they want to find out, and what they were taught.
Advantages: This helps students engage into prior knowledge, learn new topics, and can help a teacher monitor the students thinking.
Disadvantages: Students might get behind easily if they miss a class and they cannot catch up together with the whole class. Students might stray off when using the chart.
ELLS: These students might get confused but if they have help with either the teacher or another student they can learn how to correctly organize their work.

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Description: This is a type of graphic organizer that helps students learn elements of a story. Being able to learn details like plot and characters.
Advantages: This help students improve their comprehension. A framework for identifying the elements of the story.
Disadvantages: This can confuse a student if they have a different idea when it comes to important elements in the story they are reading.
ELLS: This can be good to use for ELL students if the layout is simple and the students can clearly read what they need to put. Having the answers already there and the student can just choose the correct answer for them to see.

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I recently found this amazing story map poster idea:

Pinterest brought me to this post on Growing Kinders, and Kathleen got this idea from Kim Adsit's website. I just love sharing! The great, great thing about this poster is that you can use it again, and again- I love visuals. I love this! We read this book last week right before I did an art project with my little ones. If you have never read The Dot, I highly recommend it!
Any great poster ideas, or book recommendations? Share in the comments, we LOVE comments : )

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Need a great Story Map? Look no further!

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I recently found this amazing story map poster idea: Pinterest brought me to this post on Growing Kinders, and Kathleen got this idea from Kim Adsit's website. I just love sharing! The great, great thing about this poster is that you can use it again, and again--- I love visuals.

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Description: This is a comprehension strategy that is used before the reading is done. Student's will read several topics with key concepts that will be in the text. Often they are structured statements that students can agree or disagree with.
Advantage: This guide stimulates students interest in a topic to set the purpose for the reading. Helps connect new information with prior knowledge and to help build curiosity over the new text.
Disadvantages: Some students might not get anything really out of these agree/disagree statements. Sometimes a topic is not broad enough to make these types of questions.
ELLS: For ELLS if the worksheet is clearly typed out and they can use a simple format to do so.

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Prior Knowledge - Anticipation Guide - Literacy Resources