There is something very special about gathering students around to read a great story, and even better when that story has the power to illuminate shared experiences and bring us closer together as a community. Read this blog to get three easy-to-implement, meaningful strategies for building an interactive read-aloud that will integrate social and emotional concepts with literacy activities.

As far as hot topics in literacy go, the Science of Reading would make the top of the list. If you google the term, you get a myriad of results, from trainings to programmatic promises. In an effort to support all teachers align their classrooms to the Science of Reading, let’s examine three considerations that can greatly impact student achievement by ensuring that evidence-based opportunities exist in every classroom.

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.

Today’s literacy curricula are filled with various literacy-related components that teachers are often lacking the time or energy to cover all these competencies. How can teaching be made more efficient? One way is to connect word roots instruction to those daily events and commemorations that we want students to learn about.

I was in the fifth grade when I first met the word quadruped while reading a homework assignment about mammals (“live-bearing quadrupeds”). Miss Patterson showed us how to unlock the meaning of a long or difficult word - even if we had never heard the word before – by finding its roots. My big “aha moment” occurred in the fifth grade, but it can happen to any student at any age. It’s never too late to learn a few roots, and the sooner the better!

If you're looking for authentic reasons to encourage your students to go back into a text and find evidence to support their thinking, we hear you. Monologue takes the skill of finding evidence to a new level. It is a literary empowerment tool for students. Drafting a powerful monologue invites students to read across a set of texts that includes different sources about one subject in order to glean an understanding from multiple perspectives.