Parent resources

 

PARENT RESOURCE PAGE

Parents are their child's first and most important teacher.  Throughout their first years of school, teachers are helping your child develop reading skills that will enable him or her to become a proficient reader.  The home-school connection is crucial to make sure learning takes place in reading.  Learning to read takes practice at school and at home as well.

Lay a strong foundation for reading success.  Helping your child develop good reading and comprehension skills takes planning.  Just as one would plan for any event that is important, there must be a conscious and informed effort when teaching reading to one's child. 

Included in the following links are tips that may be helpful to parents. 
Story Time
Language Rich Home
Parent School Connection

Comprehension Strategies for English Language Learners

The following information on English Language Learners was taken directly from the website:  http://www.ascd.org/ascd-express/vol5/511-breiseth.aspx

 

1.   Build background knowledge.

• Draw on students' existing knowledge. Students may already possess content knowledge that they cannot yet demonstrate in English. Look for opportunities to make associations between students' experiences and new content. Allow students to use their native language with peers for a quick brainstorm to discover what they know about a topic before presenting their ideas to the whole class.
• Build students' background knowledge. Students with limited or interrupted schooling may not have the same level of knowledge as their peers, especially when it comes to historical or cultural topics. When starting a new lesson, look for references that you may need to explicitly explain.
• Take students on a tour of the text. Each time you hand out a new textbook, take students on a "virtual tour." Show them different elements of the text, such as the table of contents and the glossary, and discuss how these sections can be helpful. Explain how the text is organized, pointing out bold print, chapter headings, and chapter summaries. Once students learn how to recognize these elements, they will be able to preview the text independently. Remember that students need to know how to use a tool in order for it to be helpful.
• Use a "picture-walk." You can use this strategy for fiction or nonfiction books. Walk through the book with the students, pointing out photographs, illustrations, and other graphic elements. Ask them what they notice about the pictures and how they think those details may relate to the story or content.
• Use outlines to scaffold comprehension. Provide a brief, simple outline of a reading assignment or an oral discussion in advance of a new lesson. This will help ELLs pick out the important information as they listen or read.

2. Teach vocabulary explicitly.

• Focus on key vocabulary: Choose the vocabulary that your students need to know in order to support their reading development and content-area learning. Provide student-friendly definitions for key vocabulary.
• Include signal and directional words: Remember that students may also need explicit instruction in signal or directional words ("because" and "explain"), in addition to key content vocabulary ("photosynthesis" and "evolution").
• Teach students to actively engage with vocabulary: Teach students to underline, highlight, make notes, and list unknown vocabulary words as they read.
• Give students practice with new words: Ensure that your students can
  • Define a word.
  • Recognize when to use that word.
  • Understand multiple meanings (such as the word "party").
  • Decode and spell that word.
• Incorporate new words into discussions and activities. For students to really know a word, they must use it—or they will lose it. Use new words in class discussions or outside of class, in other contexts such as on field trips. Give the students as many opportunities to use and master the new vocabulary as possible.

3. Check comprehension frequently.

• Use informal comprehension checks: To test students' ability to put materials in sequence, for example, print sentences from a section of the text on paper strips, mix the strips, and have students put them in order.
• Test comprehension with student-friendly questions: After reading, test students' comprehension with carefully crafted questions, using simple sentences and key vocabulary from the text. These questions can be at the:
  • Literal level (Why do the leaves turn red and yellow in the fall?)
  • Interpretive level (Why do you think it needs water?)
  • Applied level (How much water are you going to give it? Why?)
• No matter what the students' proficiency level, ask questions that require higher-level thinking: To probe for true comprehension, ask questions that require students to analyze, interpret, or explain what they have read, such as the following:
  • What ideas can you add to...?
  • Do you agree? Why or why not?
  • What might happen if...?
  • How do you think she felt...?
• Use graphic organizers: Graphic organizers allow ELLs to organize information and ideas efficiently without using much language. Different types include Venn diagrams, K-W-L charts, story maps, cause-and-effect charts, and time lines.
• Provide students with many different ways to show what they know: Drawings, graphs, oral interviews, posters, and portfolios are just a few ways that students can demonstrate understanding as they are beginning to develop their reading and writing skills in English.
• Summarize: Ask students to use the following strategies to summarize, orally or in writing, what they have read:
  • Retell what you read, but keep it short.
  • Include only important information.
  • Leave out less important details.
  • Use key words from the text.

Activating Prior Knowledge

Activating prior knowledge requires readers to draw from their background knowledge and to use that knowledge to help them understand what they are reading.  Background knowledge is made up of a person's experiences with the world (including what he or she has read), along with his or her concepts for how written text works, including word identification, print concepts, word meaning, and how text is organized.

Activating prior knowledge is something that we do naturally as proficient readers. We always relate what we're reading to something we know. As a matter of fact when we read we really have to think about those connections. Sometimes students don’t access their background knowledge because they never think that it's important or if they don’t have the background knowledge the teacher doesn’t have an opportunity to really build that background knowledge.

The following links provide strategies for activating prior knowledge.
Think-pair-share 
Anticipation Guide
K-W-L Chart 

Synthesizing

Synthesizing takes the process of summarizing one step further.  Synthesizing involves combining ideas and allowing an evolving understanding of text.  This strategy is linked to determining importance.  As with other reading comprehension strategies, it requires explicit instruction and modeling.  As the reader reflects on what is important, new information is combined with prior knowledge and connections are made.  Synthesizing reminds me of putting pieces of a puzzle together so that the whole picture becomes clear.

Synthesizing requires the reader to draw conclusions as well as identify or summarize important points.   Many strategies are employed in this strategy.  Bits of information are pulled together to form a new idea or understanding.  New insights are gained. 


For more information:
Prezi on synthesis

Determining Importance

Determining Importance is a reading comprehension strategy that is often difficult for struggling readers.  This strategy requires readers to distinguish between information that is important for comprehension as opposed to information that is just interesting. 

In narrative texts, readers must be able to identify main ideas or infer themes of a story.
Determining importance is especially important in nonfiction text.  In order for students to be proficient in this skill, teachers need to provide explicit instruction with extensive practice.  Readers must be able to decide what is important enough to commit to memory as opposed to the information that is not as important to the meaning.  In nonfiction, text structures give hints to what is important and the organization of information.  An example is the bold print which may be used for important vocabulary.  

Following are resources to aid in teaching determining importance:
Two-column notes 
Determining Importance 
Alphaboxes (students determine the importance of words that reflect important points in the story)

Inference

I often describe inference to my students by saying that it means being able to read between the lines.  Making an inference involves using background knowledge combined with information from the text and illustrations to draw conclusions about what is implied but not directly stated.  In other words, sometimes an author does not come right out and tell something but uses words or illustrations to show readers so they can draw their own conclusions.

Many readers' questions are not explicitly answered by the author but through inferences made by the readers.  Proficient readers create meaning based on the implicit ideas they infer.

For more information:

• Slideshare offers great Powerpoints on inferencing by accessing Inferencing.   
• Reading Rockets has great information for reading.  Access Reading Rockets Inference Strategy for more information. 
• Reading Strategies

Visualization

Visualization is the process or result of forming mental images while reading or listening to a story.   When readers draw on their knowledge and experiences to see pictures in their minds, they are engaging in visualization. By vividly visualizing the events depicted by the author's words, creative readers allow themselves to become part of the story; they see the colors, hear the sounds, feel the textures, taste the flavors, and smell the odors the writer describes. They will find that they are living the story as they read. By doing this, they will enjoy the story more and understand it more deeply.  

Visualizing strengthens reading comprehension skills as students gain a more thorough understanding of the text they are reading by consciously using the words to create mental images.  Visualization aids in comprehension of texts and retention of content.  

Visualizing text as it is being read or heard also creates personal links between the readers/listeners and text.  This relates to the strategy of making connections.   Readers who can imagine the characters they read about, for instance, may become more involved with what they are reading. This makes for a more meaningful reading experience and promotes continued reading.


Lessons for teaching visualization may be found at Creating Mental Images.

A  template for younger readers that can be downloaded is available through Mental Images template.

More information about Visualization may be found at Mosaic Tools.

Questioning Reading Strategy

A second reading strategy that helps students with comprehension is questioning.   Questioning is a strategy or skill that is used in our everyday lives.  They help us to focus on what is important.  A proficient reader questions subconsciously as well as consciously.  These questions help us to understand what the author's purpose is, the style of writing, and format of writing.  Some questions are "thin" questions, where answers can easily be located within the text.  Others are "thick", or deep,  and require a degree of inference, prior knowledge, and synthesis to determine a possible answer.

Self-Questioning is the ongoing process of asking questions before, during, and after reading that are used by a reader to understand text. The questions posed are based on clues that are found in the text and are generated to spark curiosity that focuses the reader's attention on investigating, understanding, and connecting to the text.  Self-questioning helps students generate, think about, predict, investigate, and answer questions that satisfy curiosity about what is being read.
 

A good reference that could be used to help students understand the concept of questioning when reading is 
Slide share for questioning.
If one needs direction in teaching this strategy, a good site for lesson planning is Comprehension Questioning notes.
A third site with lesson planning for questioning is Questioning Lesson Plan.

Making Connections

One very important reading strategy that assists with comprehension is Making Connections.  Making connections is dependent upon prior knowledge.  Prior knowledge consists of  what we have experienced, what we have read, or what we have been exposed to.  Proficient readers build upon this knowledge as they read new material.  When readers become aware of what they already know, they are better able to build bridges from prior knowledge and experiences to new learning.  When connections are made, retention and understanding is improved.

 There are three types of connections that students can make.  One is the text-to-self connection.  In this connection, students draw upon personal knowledge or experiences and connect those to what they are reading.  A second connection is text-to-text connections.  Students connect prior knowledge from what they have read and connect it to what they are currently reading.  A third type of connection is the text-to-world connection.  This may include students connecting prior knowledge gleaned from world experiences or current events, for example, to aid in comprehension of current reading.

 

Using the iPad

There are a number of APPS available on the iPad that will assist students with learning to read and comprehend.  One such APP is Reading Comprehension.  It has twenty stories about daily life.  These are all nonfiction.  Another is Reading Comprehension.  The target audience is K-8.  There are passages with multiple-choice at the end.   There are visuals that accompany the text.  Reading Trainer is an APP that improves reading speed for improved comprehension.  Enchanted Dictionary improves general and academic vocabulary across content areas for improved fluency and comprehension.