Reading for Academic Success

1. Reading for Academic Success Huntington Middle School Professional Development: Dawn Bray and Amy Summers

2. But I’m not a reading teacher, why does reading matter to me? • Reading is an essential skill in our society. • Reading is a skill we count on everyday. • Reading is thinking, and thinking is a necessary skill in every area of life.

3. Enhanced reading skills improves a student’s ability to…… • Read a textbook • Take notes • Understand content vocabulary • Infer about concept beyond textbook reading • Improve writing skills • Develop personal and informational reading styles

4. Textbook ReadingWhy are textbooks hard to read????? • Textbooksarrange ideas in groups(big idea to detail or visa-versa),and students often miss this “invisible” arrangement. • Information OVERLOAD…the prose is saturated with facts, names, equations, battles, formulas, figures, diagrams, charts, old concepts, new concepts, and questions overwhelms students. • Content vocabulary…..Use of prior knowledge or contextual clues is often difficult to use for processing of new vocabulary because the supporting ideas/concepts are also new to the student. • Textbook “authority”….students often forget textbooks are written by real people, so the information is presented with some degree of bias as a result of human nature. Students forget they can question or explore a topic beyond the textbook presentation of a concept.This can result in passive readers.

5. Remedies for students struggling with textbook reading • Help student understand parts of textbook and layout of chapters. “Teaching of Reading” p. 21-C • Give a chapter overview prior to reading • Model note-taking while reading: creating an outline, number line, or vocabulary chart • Model reading textbook aloud and demonstrate voice inflection for non-fiction text • Give guiding questions prior to reading or cloze paragraph activity of textbook page “Teaching of Reading” p. 21 I-K • Teach students to break down larger chapters and write summaries after smaller text sections. • Teach students the importance of reading charts, diagrams, and graphs in a text.

6. Try these “student marking strategies” • * means IMPORTANT or STUDY MORE • means I UNDERSTAND THIS • ? Means I DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS or I HAVE A QUESTION ABOUT THIS Teach students to use these symbols while reading or taking notes as personal and visual reminders about their comprehension of the text.

7. Taking meaningful notes a student can READ later and use…. • Graphic organizers • “split screen” notes: fold a sheet of paper “hotdog” style and as student reads, major ideas are written on one side and supporting details are written on the other • Use the 3 marking *, ?, symbols in note • Use the chapter’s “natural outline” to guide note-taking • Model note-taking to students • Have students READ their notes in class and share with peers

8. Personal VocabularyImpacts Reading • Students with limited personal vocabularies struggle with reading all types of texts • To truly master a word, a student should be able to SAY it, SPELL it, DEFINE it, and USE it “Teaching of Reading” p. 21-E. • Word walls, flashcards, pictures, graphic organizers, synonyms, identify parts of a word: root, prefix, and suffix, word banks, peer teaching • Mix up your strategies and use them often • Vocabulary development supports fiction and content reading AND TEST TAKING

9. Vocabulary Resources A list of 17 vocabulary strategies can be found in your “Teaching of Reading” folder in appendix D of page 21

10. Inferring beyond the textbook or novel • Read for meaning • Create visual images as you read • Learn to compare and contrast information, even characters in a novel