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  • 4 Mentor Texts for Teaching Compare & Contrast

    I absolutely LOVE to teach students to compare and contrast. I can’t explain it, but I love to take books that are obviously similar and pick them apart. I also love trying to find similarities between two very different books.  I like to introduce comparing and contrasting by using classic stories that many of my […]

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  • 4 Mentor Texts for Teaching Synthesizing

    Teaching students to recognize when a synthesis is happening is DIFFICULT! Like seriously, it was a really hard concept for me to wrap my mind around as a reader. Over time though, I began to see that nearly all characters in a story with a decent plot make some type of change over time. As […]

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  • A Quick Anchor Chart for Organizing Background Knowledge

    Taking a few minutes to access background knowledge can be an essential part of improving reading comprehension. Research shows that our brains need somewhere “to go” with the information as we read. Simply reminding students to think about their background knowledge isn’t enough. For my special education students, I wanted a way to allow them […]

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  • 4 Mentor Texts for Teaching 1st & 3rd Person

    In my early years of teaching upper elementary, I struggled to help my students understand the difference of 1st and 3rd person in a story. Honestly, I think I overcomplicated it! I began having my students determine WHO was telling the story based on the pronouns used and the information that was given. Using a […]

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  • A Quick & Easy Strategy for Determining the Main Idea

    My kids are getting pretty good at developing a main idea sentence when I provide them with key words. Which is great, right? But the point of reading (and unfortunately, testing) isn’t to tell what the main idea is after your teacher gives you a list of five words. No. We want our kids to […]

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  • 4 Mentor Texts for Teaching Theme & Main Idea

    Some people teach theme and main idea separately, which is totally fine. However, I like to teach them together. I like my students to be able to see that the main idea can be very simple and tells what the story or passage was about on a surface level. A theme, on the other hand, […]

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