Lighten your teaching load
Reading comprehension activities help

Reading comprehension activities aimed at helping students read short pieces of nonfiction writing are a super way to reduce your workload.

If you use the resources at hand — the students' own English language arts texts — you can make your reading instruction do triple and even quadruple duty.

Let me give you an oversimplified example.

A simple illustration

Let’s say you are going to teach a grammar lesson on the distinction between active and passive voice verbs. If you play your cards right, you can turn that single-emphasis lesson into grammar, writing, research, and reading comprehension activities — all wrapped up in one neat, brief package.

You might begin by having students read the discussion in their textbooks about active and passive verbs. It will probably be no more than three paragraphs.

Next you could have students identify the main idea in one paragraph. In a body paragraph, the topic sentence is usually the first sentence. To see if that’s the case in your paragraph, have students look for repeated words.

The meaningful words that get used most often are probably most important. Ignore words like the, in, a, and. Look for nouns and verbs.

The main idea of the paragraph is sure to include that important, often-repeated keyword. You might also have students find synonyms or pronouns that are used in place of the most important words.

Have students find what the topic sentence asserts about the keyword. The topic sentence of a paragraph will contain a topic (i.e., a grammatical subject) and an assertion about that topic.

To tie the grammar reading to the students’ writing, make sure you use the term topic sentence.

To tie the grammar reading to research skills, use the term keyword to refer to the most important word in the paragraph.

In 10 minutes, you taught a grammar lesson, a writing lesson, a reading lesson, and a research lesson.

How cool is that?

The next step is to use that material as a writing prompt. I just happen to have a writing prompt on the subject of active and passive voice that you can download free.

Don't rely on reading to make writers

I am not going to tell you that this sort of reading comprehension activity will turn your little darlings into award-winning writers.

Being able to recognize a topic sentence or a transition doesn’t guarantee that your students can write one, but it’s a starting place.

Students won’t learn much about writing from reading writing, even with your help. People learn to write only by writing. However, if you combine some basic reading instruction with some basic writing instruction, the two complement each other.

You may find, as I do, that teaching writing in the formulaic manner I recommend improves students' ability to read nonfiction material.

What’s even better is that by integrating two or more aspects of your course curriculum into short reading comprehension activities you cut down on the number of lesson plans you must prepare. You can use the same lesson plan week after week with only minor adjustments.