science-of-reading
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Teaching Like Normal (Even Though It’s Test Prep Season)
The Moment I Realized Teaching Was About to Stop I’ve never really done test prep. It’s not because I don’t care about the state exams. It’s just that my philosophy has always kind of been, if the students are doing hard work (reading challenging texts, analyzing syntax, wrestling with figurative language… you know things that… Continue reading
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The Reading & Writing Olympics: A 2-Week Secondary ELA Skills Training Unit
When students struggle with reading tasks, it’s easy for us as secondary ELA teachers to assume the issue is purely motivation. They just don’t want to read. But for many secondary students, the real barrier is that they are missing key foundational skills. They’re missing the reading and writing muscles they need in order to… Continue reading
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What the Science of Reading Looks Like in a Secondary Classroom
When most people hear “Science of Reading,” they picture phonics charts, decodable readers, and first graders sounding out c-a-t and d-o-g. And while those things are absolutely part of reading development, they don’t reflect the full picture, especially for those of us who work with older students. What if I told you that…. The Science… Continue reading
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Writing to Boost Reading Comprehension
When we think about the Science of Reading, writing doesn’t always come to mind first. But the truth is, writing plays a powerful role in strengthening students’ comprehension—especially when aligned to the same levels we address in Scarborough’s Reading Rope: word recognition and language comprehension. Scarborough’s Reading Rope reminds us that reading comprehension is a… Continue reading
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Top Paragraph Activities for Engaging Students and Building Comprehension
We’re almost at the end of this blog series! We’ve discussed word level comprehension, sentence level decoding and now we’re looking at whole paragraphs. Understanding how paragraphs, or small parts of a text, work together is essential for reading comprehension. Strong topic sentences, logical paragraph order, and effective transition words guide readers through an author’s… Continue reading
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Teaching Sentence-Level Decoding in the Context of Texts: Engaging Activities for Middle and High School Teachers
When teaching middle and high school students, one of the most crucial skills for reading comprehension… but one that gets eliminated or skimmed over waaaaaaay toooooooo often, is sentence-level decoding. Usually, when we hear the word decoding, we automatically think of decoding words and assume that it is an elementary level skill that we don’t… Continue reading
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10 Engaging Vocabulary Activities for Stronger Word Knowledge in Secondary ELA
Building strong word knowledge is essential for students’ reading comprehension, writing skills, and overall language development. It is the most foundational part of reading but, often, our students come to us behind. There are absolutely times when interventions are necessary. I have another blog post on what those might look like for your secondary students,… Continue reading
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Five Essential Steps to Comprehension
In a world full of information, understanding what you read is one of the most essential skills a person can have. Whether you’re enjoying a novel, perusing a news article, or tackling a technical manual, comprehension helps you grasp the meaning, connect to new ideas, and make informed decisions. So here are the five necessary… Continue reading
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A Simple Way to Teach the Science of Reading in Secondary ELA (using one poem!)
This post is part of the Teaching Poetry Fest series that includes tons of poetry ideas from over TWENTY secondary ELA teacher-authors. Be sure to follow the hop to Lit with Lyns’ post about Taking the Intimidation out of Teaching Poetry to keep the inspiration going. You can also check out the resource round-up to… Continue reading
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Understanding Comprehension: A Key to Learning
What Does It Really Mean to Comprehend? To be completely honest, when I first started looking into how to help my older students comprehend, I don’t think I fully understood what it meant to comprehend. Read words.Understand what they say. The end. But it is actually way more complex than that. The amount of work… Continue reading
