Jim's Hints

Let Students Vote on Stories to Be Recited. To build student motivation for this activity, you may occasionally want to let the class vote on a book that they would like to recite. If your range of book choices is constrained by your curriculum, you might offer 4-5 acceptable stories and have students choose from that list.

Make Your Book Recitations Public Events. Oral recitation lessons are intended as public performances. Once your students become comfortable reading aloud to an audience, you might invite other classes or parents to attend your final readings.

Another idea is to help your students to turn an oral recitation lesson into a community service experience. For example, students might ask residents of a nursing home to select a story that they would enjoy hearing and then visit the facility to give an expressive reading.

Jim's Hints

Have Your Students Become More Active Reading Participants. As your students become more adept at using mental imagery and text illustrations to comprehend their reading, enlist them in critical discussions about the strengths or drawbacks of a particular book, chapter, or article. How clearly does the author write? Is it easy or difficult to form mental pictures of the passage's content, and why? How would they grade the author on the quality and clarity of his or her illustrations?

Attachments

• Main Idea Graphic Organizer sheet

Jim's Hints

Use a Giant 'Main Idea Map' to Teach The Strategy. You can make the teaching of this strategy fun and highly interactive by drawing a giant version of the Main Idea Graphic Organizer onto newsprint and laying it on the floor.

Assign each individual in the class to read through a practice passage and write out a summary main-idea phrase and key ideas or facts for each paragraph. Review the passage with the group.

For each paragraph, invite a volunteer to stand on the space on the giant organizer that corresponds to the paragraph and read aloud his or her summary for class feedback. Continue through the passage until all paragraphs have been reviewed and student volunteers have occupied each point on the graphic organizer.

Attachments

"Click or Clunk" Reading Check Sheet

Jim's Hints

Create Silent "Click/Clunk" Signals. Although it may seem rather silly to have students call out "Click" and "Clunk" as an aid to monitor their own reading, .the technique is actually quite valuable. When students must make regular summary judgments about how well they comprehend at the sentence level, they are more likely to recognize-and to resolve-comprehension errors as these mistakes arise.

You might find, however, that students start to distract each other as they call out these comprehension signals. Once you see that students consistently use the technique, you can train them to softly whisper the signal. Or confer with your students to come up with an unobtrusive non-verbal signal (e.g., lightly tapping the desk once for "Click" and twice for "Clunk") that is obvious enough to allow you to monitor readers' use of the technique without distracting other students.

Jim's Hints

Literacy Web: Reading Comprehension Links. Browse through a large and varied list of recommended reading-instruction links grouped into the following categories: (1) vocabulary instruction, (2) text comprehension instruction, (3) teacher preparation and comprehension strategies instruction, and (4) websites for comprehension practice. This page is a part of 'The Literacy Web', a wonderful cataloging of literacy links and Internet resources created by Dr. Donald J. Leu and Julie Coiro at the University of Connecticut.

Reading Interventions for K-1. Created by the Florida Center for Reading Research, this site contains short, research-based student reading activities suitable for grades K-1. The activities cover phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

Reading Quest: Improving Comprehension of Textbook Material. Find ideas to help students to grapple with and better understand their textbook readings. Teachers can discover how to use a 'K-W-L' (Known-Want [to Learn]-Learned) chart to encourage students to engage prior knowledge of a topic, encourage students to take notes using a 'Power Thinking' approach, and many other ideas. The site was created by Raymond C. Jones, assistant professor of social studies education at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC.

Reading Strategies: A-Z. Visit the site 'Reading Rockets' to discover many articles with intervention and instructional ideas to help struggling readers. Reading Rockets is supported by WETA, the Washington, D.C. public television and radio station and is funded by a major grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs.

Scaffolded Reading Comprehension Ideas. The Greece (NY) school district has posted 22 reading comprehension strategies to 'scaffold students' interactions with texts'. These strategies are organized according to the stage of the reading process (pre-reading, reading, post-reading) that they address. Each strategy write-up includes a brief introduction, steps to implement, and ideas to adapt or differentiate the strategy with different student groups or instructional objectives.

The Savvy Teacher's Guide: Reading Interventions That Work. This free 52-page manual (Adobe Acrobat format) contains 4 teacher intervention scripts to build student reading fluency and 10 scripts to boost comprehension. Strategies in the manual are based on practices recommended by the National Reading Panel.

Jim's Hints

Take Steps to Keep the Student Invested in the Activity. Repeated reading is effective as an intervention to build student reading fluency because it gives the student lots of reading practice. However, this activity could become dull and uninteresting for the student over time. If you find that the student is beginning to lose interest in repeated reading, consider:

• Providing praise to the student in specific terms for good reading.
• Allowing the student to pick out high-interest books or articles to use for repeated reading.
• Using a stop-watch, monitor the student's reading rate during each repeated reading and chart the results on a graph.

Jim's Hints

Consider Using Paired Reading for Peer Tutoring or as a Parent Strategy. Paired reading is a highly structured but simple strategy that can easily be taught to others-including to school-age children and youth. If you have a pool of responsible older students available you may want to create a cross-age peer tutoring program that uses paired reading as its central intervention. Or train parents to use this simple reading strategy when they read with their children at home.

Jim's Hints

Ask Occasional Comprehension Questions. You can promote reading comprehension by pausing periodically to ask the student comprehension questions about the story (e.g., who, what, when, where, how) and to encourage the student to react to what you both have read (e.g., "Who is your favorite character so far? Why?").

Preview a Text Multiple Times as a Rehearsal Technique. In certain situations, you may wish to practice a particular text selection repeatedly with the student, using the listening passage preview approach. For example, if the student is placed in a reading book that is quite difficult for him or her to read independently, you might rehearse the next assigned story with the student several times so that he or she can read the story more fluently during reading group.

Attachments

• Curriculum-Based Measurement: A Manual for Teachers (Wright, 1992)
• Kids as Reading Helpers: A Peer Tutor Training Manual.
• Chapter 1: Peer Tutor Training Kit: An Introduction.
• Chapter 2: Peer Tutoring: Assembling the Pieces. 
• Chapter 3: Launching.
• Lesson 1: Peer Tutoring.
• Lesson 2: How to Give Praise to Tutees.
• Lesson 3: How to Do Paired Reading or 'Listening While Reading'.
• Lesson 4: Peer Tutoring: Graduation Day!
• Sample Teacher Letters. 

Jim's Hints

Peer Tutor Manual: Contents at a Glance...

• Kids as Reading Helpers: A Peer Tutor Training Manual. The complete manual is designed as an outof-the-box peer-tutoring start-up program. It includes instructions to prepare for and launch a school-based peer tutoring program in reading. The manual also contains a scripted 4-lesson tutor training curriculum. [58 Pages/File Type:PDF/File Size:1.5MB]
• Chapter 1: Peer Tutor Training Kit: An Introduction. The first chapter gives a rationale for peer tutoring. [3 Pages/File Type:PDF/File Size:132KB]
• Chapter 2: Peer Tutoring: Assembling the Pieces.  School-wide peer tutoring depends on thoughtful advance preparation. This chapter provides a clear sequence for setting up a peer tutoring program. It includes helpful forms and sample teacher & parent letters. [16 Pages/File Type:PDF/File Size:220KB]
• Chapter 3: Launching. This section highlights the tasks necessary to 'kick off' peer tutoring. It discusses how to train peer tutors, match tutors to tutees, monitor the quality of peer tutoring, and monitor student progress over time. The chapter includes forms to match tutors to tutees and to conduct observations of tutoring sessions. [7 Pages/File Type:PDF/File Size:183KB]
• Lesson 1: Peer Tutoring. Students are taught the behavioral expectations for serving as a peer tutor, including how to pass quietly through hallways, enter classrooms to pick up students, and address tutee misbehavior. [9 Pages/File Type:PDF/File Size:335KB]
• Lesson 2: How to Give Praise to Tutees. Giving praise does not come naturally to most elementary students! In this lesson, tutors-in-training get lots of practice in recognzing when and how to praise their tutees. [8 Pages/File Type:PDF/File Size:209KB]
• Lesson 3: How to Do Paired Reading or 'Listening While Reading'. The academic strategies at the heart of this peer tutoring program are paired reading and 'listening while reading'. This lesson teaches peer tutors to be reliable and consistent in carrying out these fluency building techniques. [4 Pages/File Type:PDF/File Size:170KB]
• Lesson 4: Peer Tutoring: Graduation Day! In this training session, tutors get to feel good about 'graduating' from their training while the trainer conducts a final evaluation of their skills. [7 Pages/File Type:PDF/File Size:301KB]
• Sample Teacher Letters.  Download the sample teacher and parent letters included in Chapter 2 of the manual as a single Microsoft Word file . Customize the letters in minutes for your school and send them out! [8 Pages/File Type:MS Word/File Size:78KB]

References

• Ehly, S. (1986). Peer Tutoring: A guide for school psychologists. Washington, DC: National Association of School Psychologists.
• Garcia-Vazquez, E., & Ehly, S. (1995). Best practices in  facilitating peer tutoring programs. In A. Thomas & J.Grimes (Eds.),  Best Practices in School Psychology-III (pp.403-411). Washington, DC:  National Association of School Psychologists.Stanovich, K.E. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some  consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy.  Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 360-407.Topping, K. (1987). Paired reading: A powerful technique for parent use. Reading Teacher, 40, 608-614.
• Wright, J. (1992). Curriculum-based measurement: A manual for  teachers. Available online at:  http://www.jimwrightonline.com/pdfdocs/cbaManual.pdf