#SoRin2ndary
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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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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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Effective Word-Level Interventions for the Secondary Setting
Decoding skills are foundational for reading proficiency, but many secondary students still struggle in this area. These students don’t just struggle academically. They often exhibit behavior problems, as well, as a way to mask their inability to read. Their difficulty with decoding makes it impossible to engage with and comprehend grade-level texts across all subjects.… 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!)
One of the biggest buzz words in education right now is The Science of Reading. And while it’s often framed as an elementary initiative, the truth is: the research behind skilled reading matters just as much in secondary classrooms. Reading is one of the most complex skills the human brain learns to master. It requires… Continue reading
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Six Ideas for Building Background Knowledge in your Secondary Classroom
Background knowledge is one of the components of Scarborough’s Reading Rope and a necessary part of reading comprehension. Without relevant background knowledge, students have nothing to spark that brain power necessary for understanding what they read. One of our go-to strategies for teaching comprehension is asking students to make connections to what they are reading.… 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
