Creating a Postive Classroom Culture

A concept sort is a comprehension strategy in which students sort new vocabulary into categories.

Interactive “foldables” help students learn new vocabulary through defining, illustrating and using words in sentences.

Guess the Covered Word challenges students’ vocabularies and reading comprehension by requiring them to deduce words redacted from a text.

Meet New Vocabulary uses a graphic organizer to help students acquire new vocabulary while reading. This strategy is most effective when teaching challenging, domain-specific words (Tier Three).

Agree/disagree statements challenge students to think critically about their knowledge of a topic, theme or text. The strategy exposes students to the major ideas in a text before reading—engaging their thinking and motivating them to learn more. It also requires them to reconsider their original thinking after reading the text and to use textual evidence to support and explain their thinking.

“Annolighting” (annotating and highlighting) shows students how to identify critical information in a text during close reading. Students learn to annotate text, highlight important facts and summarize what they have read to capture main ideas, concepts and details.

In shared reading, learners observe experts reading with fluency and expression while following along or otherwise engaging with the text. This strategy should focus on a specific instructional element (or mini-lesson) that improves targeted reading comprehension skills and promotes Common Core readiness.

Think Aloud requires readers to stop during their reading to think, reflect and discuss their process. Readers talk about skipping text, rereading, searching back in the text for information, questioning, clarifying, summarizing, making connections, reflecting, predicting and visualizing.

Fishbowl is a strategy for organizing medium- to large-group discussions. Students are separated into an inner and outer circle. In the inner circle, or fishbowl, students have a discussion; students in the outer circle listen to the discussion and take notes.

During a readers’ theater, two or more students dramatize a text by reading expressively.

Save the Last Word for Me is a comprehension strategy that builds speaking and listening skills by structuring a text-based discussion for students. Students highlight two to three of the most important sentences of the central text, then discuss their text-based responses in small groups.

Student teams look for clues and respond to questions that help them identify details, organization, inferences and comparisons in the central text.