This teaching tip showcases how students use iPads to video record themselves orally reading. In the Record, Listen, Reflect process, students conduct repeated readings with a familiar text, watch the recorded video, and conduct running records on themselves. Having an opportunity to watch videos of their own reading gives students a glimpse of…

An essential element in teaching children to effectively comprehend text is the use of teacher-led think alouds. This article presents a three-step model to improve the quality and quantity of think alouds in K-6 classrooms. The article follows elementary teachers who planned, implemented, transcribed, and reflected upon think aloud lessons to…

The purpose of this article is to explore the use of picture walks in narrative and informational text as a method to encourage question generation. This article overviews the instructional benefits of having students generate their own questions before, during, and after reading. Featured are two classrooms where students pose questions through…

When literacy instruction is driven by student-generated questions, students are able to dive deeper into text. This article explores the cognitive and motivational benefits of question generation to foster reading comprehension. The author presents classroom vignettes where students become inquisitive readers by posing their own questions. As…

An essential element in teaching children to effectively comprehend text is the use of teacher-led think-alouds. The overarching objective of this study was to explore how to better prepare early career teachers to conduct think-alouds in their classrooms. Data from 31 teachers consisted of (1) questionnaires, (2) lesson plans, (3) lesson…

Whenever Mr. Henderson's 3rd grade students had a question that he couldn't immediately answer or that seemed off-topic, he asked them to write the question on a sticky note and place it on a poster dubbed the "Parking Lot." His intention was to find time later to answer those questions, but too often, he said, the parking lot…

The author explores how the use of joke books can promote fluency in young readers. One young girl's fluency improved measurably, and her engagement and motivation to read the particular kind of text involved played a significant role. (Contains 2 tables.)

As students move up through the grades, the academic demands on them increase, and a great many of those increases come in the form of reading. The academic tasks students encounter in the upper elementary grades, and even more so in secondary school, involve a great deal of reading in support of learning new and complicated content. As the…