Use This 3-part Process to Improve Reading Comprehension

These six proven reading comprehension strategies from Strategies That Work, Mosaic of Thought and Reading with Meaning, work well when taught explicitly to students.  

The Six Reading Comprehension Strategies

1. Making Connections
2. Questioning
3. Visualizing
4. Inferring
5. Determining Importance
6. Synthesizing

When practiced and applied to reading all types of content, students internalize what they read and begin to read better on their own. Teaching these strategies is especially important for young readers, for struggling readers and for ESL students. They also enable critical thinking and help all students understand on a deeper level what they read.

But what about those students who do read well and are looking for a way to comprehend large chunks of information in a short period of time?

Try using these reading strategies within this 3-step process. The process works well when trying to remember historical figures and the significance of their contributions throughout history.

THE PROCESS

1. Read the character’s name.

• Read it out loud. Sound it out if you need to. Look for phonetic markings next to the name in parenthesis, in footnotes, or in indices. 
• Make a connection. Ask yourself if you have ever heard a name like this. What sounds familiar? What makes this name different than anything you have heard? 
• Question the origin of the name. Is the name a family name? Look for prefixes such as Mac or van or von; and suffixes such as son. Is this name from a royal family? Look for roman numeral indicators such as IV and XII that suggest lineage. Does the name indicate a warrior type? Look for descriptors such as The Lion-hearted and The Impaler following the first name.

2. Read what the character does.

• Question the significance of the actions. What affect do they have on others, on countries, on changing the course of history? Determine the importance of the actions. How did the actions help or hurt others, countries, and the course of history? 
• Make inferences about how opposite actions may have changed others, countries and the course of history. 
• Make connections. Think about what you see in society today that may be similar to the actions of this character or how your own behavior has been affected by these actions.

3. Imagine the character doing it.

• Envision what the character actually does. Imagine him/her leading a charge into battle, taking a stand against injustice with a sit-in or a boycott, and visualize character interactions who followed these characters or fought against them. 
• Use your five senses to smell the sweat of the horses, hear the galloping on the fields and the clanking of swords, firing of guns and cannons, and the agony of  injury; smell the fires burning, feel the fire hose spraying water, hear the hateful shouts and terrified screams; or feel the exaltation of group consensus and the thrill of victory, or hear the applause of recognition and the rallying cries for freedom. 
• Make connections. What have you seen, read about or been a part of similar to some of the actions taken by these characters. 
• What is the significance of these actions on the world today? Reenact these actions in your mind step-by-step. What could have been done differently? Better? Why are these actions important to know about today?

Following this 3-step process holds knowledge in short-term memory long enough to use the six reading strategies to plug the information into long-term memory. The process will help students learn a lot of information fast, but it will also help develop a deeper understanding and appreciation for the relevance of how historical characters and events have shaped societies and world events.

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Adapt this process to fit with the Project Based Learning (PBL) unit from GoTeachGo, Comic-con; A New Series of Comics for the Sunday Funnies. In this unit, students apply what they learn in literature about characters and their actions and generate their interpretations within a comic strip structure. The unit can be adapted, however, to include historical characters as well, covering the nonfiction requirement of ELA Common Core State Standards. 

This PBL unit, like all those from GoTeachGo, can be purchased on TeachersPayTeachers.

Be sure to visit Kate's TeachersPayTeachers site for lots of great PBL units.

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Recommended Reading:

Comprehension Strategies
Kids Discover - Historical Figures
Reading and Memory

Strategies That Work, Mosaic of Thought and Reading with Meaning

Illustration credit: St. Joan of Arc School

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8 Useful Links That Make Formative Assessment Easy

An interesting discussion is happening on LinkedIn. Pablo Garcia, entrepreneur, engineer and educator, starts the topic with this question: Formative Assesment: Why don't we all use it?

One answer is another question: Don't all teachers use it?

Another answer: Most teachers do use formative assessments on a daily basis, but some may not know to call them formative because the jargon of education swaps out synonymous terms every 7 to 10 years.

A solution: Project Based Learning (PBL) structures provide for lessons that enable teachers to observe student learning while they are in the process of learning. This is formative assessment.

In the LinkedIn discussion, Pablo asserts that "one learns largely through observing behaviours on the fly." Formative assessment helps teachers monitor the effects of their instruction on student learning in a similar way through observations and documentation. It provides rapid results to inform instruction, and teachers can alter techniques to fit student needs the next day instead of waiting for data analysis from the prior school year.

It's real-time assessment of instructional effectiveness and academic achievement, and Project Based Learning is the perfect structure for its implementation.

Pablo also shares an important formative assessment of his own: "When I look at what teachers actually spend time doing, I also see far too much time spent in analysing and reporting." Often teachers get pulled out of the classroom to do just that --- analyze and report. It's part of the test climate. In the classroom, however, formative assessments go on all the time. It's a matter of using running records, or formalizing the process a little more --- formal in the sense of having checklists, rubrics or student work that shows evidence of learning, and documentation that relates. Not every time, of course, but at least once or twice per lesson such as pre- and post-lesson assessments with notes on the process.

It is the issue of time in planning, and it is unbelievably disconcerting how much teachers are taken away from planning and class time to go over information that correlates with what they already know.

There is a misconception that formative assessments have to be formal and paperwork intensive. Formative assessment relies a lot on intuition, and teachers need the time in teaching ---  in the classroom --- to enable the observation process to work well. If teachers are to use more formative type assessments, they need more leeway from local and national education leaders, more curricular options that enable the implementation, and more time-saving ways to document formative assessments. Project Based Learning provides for ongoing formative assessments both formal and informal, and the structure itself is a formative assessment process.

PBL Units from GoTeachGo

Visit TeachersPayTeachers where GoTeachGo offers comprehensive PBL units. All these units provide time-saving materials and assessments for each lesson, and each lesson supports the unit objective as a whole.

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Here are some other great places to find ideas for formative assessments.

1. Project Based Learning Units (PBL) from GoTeachGo
2. 54 Different Examples of Formative Assessments
3. 103 Formative Assessments
4. Examples of Formative Assessments - West Virginia Department of Education
5. A Sampling of Formative Types of Assessments
6. Reading A-Z: Running Records and Benchmark Books
7. Teacher Vision - Printable Running Records Forms
8. Running Record Images and Links

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Recommended Reading:

Curriculum Mapping and Real-time Assessment

Assessment of Instruction - University of Texas

Summative and Formative Assesment - Indiana University, Bloomington

Illustration credit: Scholastic

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6 Common ESL Grammar Errors Conquered by Project Based Learning

Many activities help ESL students learn English, but collaboration helps bridge conversational learning with academic content. Project Based Learning (PBL) enables collaboration by requiring students to engage in partner and group structures that promote total participation and enable opportunities for differentiated instruction.

In PBL lessons and units, ESL students move more quickly toward academic language acquisition because the conversation moves from the school grounds into the classroom with instruction that promotes the inquiry process

• questioning and investigating, 
• comparing and interpreting information, 
• and reporting findings

where students work in partners and groups. How these pairings and groupings are structured depends on the number of ESL students in a classroom and their English language acquisition levels. Keep the following list of grammar problems in mind when structuring your PBL lessons and units.

6 Common ESL Grammar Errors

Some native English students struggle with these grammar concepts, but all ESL students struggle with them. It takes a long time in repetition and practice to overcome these errors, so the more options available for practice and usage, the better. This is why collaboration is so important. The understanding of these grammar concepts may be learned, but usage and practice is limited unless English is also spoken at home.

The following list of six errors also includes examples taken from "Editing Line-by-Line", a chapter written by Cynthia Linville, California State University, Sacramento, for the book ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors.

Use this list as a reference to plan your own PBL lessons and/or units.

1. Subject-verb Agreement - subject doesn't agree with verb in person or in number

• He walk every day.
• Ever teenager knows how to choose clothes that flatters her figure.

2. Verb-tense - incorrect time marker used

• I was working on my paper since 6:00 a.m.
• Even though this is my first day on the job, I have already found there were some different people here.

3. Verb-form - verbs incorrectly formed

• I will driven to the airport next week.
• I was cook dinner last night when you called.

4. Singular and plural errors - confusion about nouns that are countable and ones that aren't.

• I have turned in all my homework this week.
• I set up six more desk for the afternoon.

5. Word-form - wrong part of speech chosen

• I'm happy to live in a democracy country.
• I feel very confusing this morning.

6. Sentence structure errors - Many things---verb left out; extra word added; word order incomplete; clauses that don't belong together are punctuated as one sentence

• As a result of lack of moral values being taught by parents and the reemphasis by school many children have little respect for authority.

Check out the Critical Thinking Unit from GoTeachGo. 

Add grammar practice to the lessons in this unit. These lessons provide a perfect vehicle for grammar practice in pairs, groups and the student reflection journal sections. Students have options to discuss and share concepts individually, in pairs, within groups and for the whole class as well.

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Recommended Reading
 The Attitudes of Secondary Students Towards Learning English through Project Based Learning. 

Visit Kate's TeachersPayTeachers site for lots of great PBL units.

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