What better way to engage your students in comprehension instruction than to use popular books that have already captured their imagination and inspired their passion for reading? Harness your students' reading passion to expand their comprehension with a lesson based on Stephenie Meyer's hugely popular bestseller Twilight. The lesson is one of the theme-based lessons available in the new Guided Comprehension in Grades 3–8, Combined Second Edition. This teacher-directed whole-group lesson involves using the visualizing strategy and Open-Mind Portraits to analyze Twilight's main character, Bella. You'll see how to read the book aloud to students, guide them to discuss the thoughts and feelings of Bella, and develop an Open-Mind Portrait that represents those feelings.

To try this engaging comprehension technique download the complete Twilight lesson:

Free lesson: Fantasy: Unbridled Imagination: Twilight

Guided Comprehension in Grades 3–8 provides a step-by-step teaching framework that encourages students to become active, strategic readers by providing explicit strategy instruction, opportunities for engagement, and a variety of texts and instructional settings.

To learn more about teacher-directed whole-group instruction, the first stage of the Guided Comprehension Model, download Chapter 2 of Guided Comprehension in Grades 3–8.

Free chapter: Teacher-Directed Whole-Group Instruction

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Expand your preschoolers' vocabulary during shared book reading with Kathleen Roskos' Say-Tell-Do-Play technique. Select five words to teach that the children probably don't know and that they need for school learning. Before you begin reading, present each word to the children with an accompanying prop or picture.

Say the word, then have the children say the word. Tell the meaning of the word using a kid-friendly definition and then have the children tell a friend what the word means. For example, the new word might be “flute” with the definition as simple as “a musical instrument that we blow into.” During the reading, stop when you encounter each new word. Repeat the definition again and have the children tell a friend again. Do an action or gesture to add to the word meaning. For “flute,” you might move your fingers to pretend playing the flute. After the reading is completed, play a short game or role play with the children to encourage them to use the new words.

New techniques for shared book reading are among the many ideas for developing oral language skills in your preschool students discussed in the second edition of Oral Language and Early Literacy in Preschool: Talking, Reading, and Writing. To learn more about joining oral language and early reading and writing instruction, download Chapter 1 of Oral Language and Early Literacy in Preschool.

Free chapter: Joining Oral Language and Early Literacy

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Oral Language and Early Literacy in Preschool is one of six insightful books in the Preschool Literacy Collection—New Edition available from IRA.

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If you've ever tried to engage a classroom full of uninspired middle school students in learning weekly vocabulary words, you can relate to the challenge that faced Martha Rapp Ruddell as a young English teacher with at-risk students in a seventh grade language arts class. She was struggling to interest her students in “heretofore,” one of the weekly spelling words, when one student asked, “Why do we have to learn these words anyway?”

The question inspired Ruddell to try a new approach to vocabulary with the students—letting them choose their own words to learn. This idea developed into the Vocabulary Self-Collection Strategy (VSS). Over the course of the school year, Ruddell became convinced of the power of inviting students to choose their own spelling and vocabulary words as students that had rarely been successful beyond the C level on weekly spelling tests began to routinely get A's and B's.

To try this strategy with your students, have each student select one word per week that he or she wants to study and nominate it for the class list. The students can select words from any source including content classes, academic or recreational reading, television, conversations, popular music, or anywhere else they encountered a word that was important to them. The class can then discuss the nominated words and their definitions before finalizing a list for the week.

Vocabulary study during the week can include discussions, semantic mapping, semantic feature analysis, and other interactive word activities. At the end of the week, you can test your students on their ability to spell each of the words, explain its meaning, and write a meaningful sentence using the word.

To learn more about the Vocabulary Self-Collection Strategy, find the complete article about VSS in the new book, Essential Readings on Vocabulary Instruction. This convenient resource offers 14 outstanding articles on the critical topic of vocabulary instruction, compiled and introduced by noted expert Michael F. Graves.

To hear Michael Graves discuss selecting words to teach, download this podcast that accompanies the book.

Free podcast: IRA Insights: Graves on vocabulary instruction.

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Essential Readings on Vocabulary Instruction is the cornerstone of the IRA Library: Vocabulary collection, which also includes the books: The Vocabulary Book: Learning & Instruction and Teaching Vocabulary to Improve Reading Comprehension

To learn more about IRA Library: Vocabulary, click here.

Many of the nonfiction texts that students are asked to read rely heavily on text features—boldface, pictures with captions, tables of contents, diagrams, glossaries, indexes, etc.—to support comprehension. As students become more familiar with text features, they will begin to see them everywhere they look—and will want to show others the interesting features they find. An interactive text feature wall gives students a forum for sharing their finds and exposes them to new text features.

Tell students that they are going to make a large mural of all the different types of text features. Have them brainstorm an exhaustive list of all of the features they know and record each feature on a sentence strip.

Ask your students which features will take up the most room on the chart based on how common the feature is and how much space it takes up. For example, pictures and captions are very commonly found in a variety of texts, and they can be relatively large, so the section for that heading would need to be big. After the group has decided which headings need the most room, make a chart with boxes drawn for each type of text feature.

Instruct the students to search for various text features in magazines, newspapers, and other print sources, and then to cut them out and affix them to the mural. The mural can remain up for students to refer to throughout the year and will offer visual support to students as they begin to write their own nonfiction.

The Interactive Text Feature Wall is one of many teaching ideas for improving reading comprehension discussed in Comprehension Shouldn't Be Silent: From Strategy Instruction to Student Independence.

To read more about designing an Interactive Text Feature Wall, as well as how to plan and integrate instruction centered on cognitive units of study in predicting, connecting, questioning, visualizing, and summarizing, download Chapter 2 of Comprehension Shouldn't Be Silent.

Free chapter: Laying the Foundation for the Metacognitive Teaching Framework

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