Helping Special Education Teachers Deliver Effective Interventions
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
If your students are struggling with basic reading comprehension, more than likely, they aren’t visualizing what they are reading. As an avid reader, I often have dreams about novels that I’m reading. I get SO into it that I continue to picture and recreate the story in my mind after I’m finished reading a chapter. […]
When I first started teaching, I thought teaching students to ask questions was a waste of time. I guess, in my mind, kids should do it automatically. Once I started analyzing strengths and weaknesses, I realized that many of my kids had no idea what their brains should be doing while reading. Explicitly teaching students […]
