Maximize Summer learning: 3 best practices for designing a literacy-focused Summer school program to help close gaps and prepare students for the next year.

Research tells us that reading proficiency is highly correlated with the amount of reading that students do. Former classroom teacher and district curriculum specialist Alan Becker describes his experiences with fictional texts and how he used these engaging texts as a doorway to teach students complex comprehension standards.

Fiction or nonfiction?  Often, teachers view these two types of texts as separate and distinct, with little overlap in purpose or instruction. However, pairing fiction and nonfiction texts together in instruction can have many beneficial effects. While some students are drawn to fiction, others are naturally attracted to nonfiction. Pairing fiction and nonfiction texts help to engage both types of students, while also broadening their vocabulary and knowledge about a common topic.

Do you notice that students are starting to glaze over each time you read science, social studies, or even math text in class? Try the tips below to pump up the volume, and make content-area reading manageable and fun.

Writing. Every teacher will acknowledge its importance in education. As I visit schools across the country, teachers often share the challenge of teaching writing across the curriculum—especially in mathematics, science, social studies, the arts, and other content areas—and often lament the quality of writing that students are producing.

Students need to learn how to evaluate the information in informational text to determine the most important ideas, moderately important ideas, and less important ideas to effectively summarize what they have read. Rank-Order-Retell (Hoyt 2002) assists students in learning to identify the main idea and supporting details. In the activity, students write down phrases they consider important to the topic, taken from the text either directly or indirectly. These phrases should describe the content