Lighten your teaching load Reading comprehension activities help
Develop
reading comprehension and reduce your workload by building literacy
activities aimed at helping students read short pieces of nonfiction
writing from their English language arts text materials.
Using the instructional matter in ELA texts as the basis for
teaching reading skills lets you accomplish several goals simultaneously.
Let me give you an oversimplified example of how the process
works.
Multi-functional grammar lesson
Lets say you are going to teach a grammar lesson on the
distinction between active and passive voice verbs. Here is a
list of activities you can do within the framework of teaching
grammar that will improve students' reading comprehension
and several other skills as well.
1. Begin by having students read silently the discussion
in their text about active and passive verbs. Ask students
to identify a word or phrase that they think is the topic (subject)
of the entire passage.
The entire passage will probably be no more than a couple paragraphs.
To tie the grammar reading to research skills, use the term keyword
to refer to the most important word (or phrase) in the section.
2. Have students identify the main idea in one paragraph of
their grammar text material.
Remind students that the topic
sentence of a body paragraph is often the first sentence.
To see if the topic sentence is the first sentence in their paragraph,
paragraph, have students begin by looking for keywords.
Then have students find a sentence that asserts something
about the keyword of the paragraph.
3. Remind students that the topic
sentence and thesis sentence are alike in that
both contain a topic and an assertion about it.
4. You can repeat the process of finding topic sentences
for eachparagraph in the passage.
5. You might also have students find synonyms or pronouns
that are used in place of the most important nouns and
verbs in the passage. The synonyms and pronouns are important
elements in reading comprehension.
6. Point out to students that the synonyms and pronouns
are also used to tie sentences together so a paragraph appears
fluent. Without them, writing sounds repetitious and choppy.
7. Have students test their understanding by identifying examples
of active and passive sentences in the passage they just read.
8. Round off the lesson with an informal writing activity
in which students:
Explain in 2-5 sentences the difference between active and
passive voice; or
Write one sentence in active voice and rewrite it in passive
voice; or
Tell you want they still don't understand about the active/passive
voice distinction.
In this lesson, you've taught reading comprehension, grammar, writing
skills, study skills, and some vocabulary for research.
Many students won't get the distinction between active and passive
after one session. You may need to reteach the concept using similar
procedures with material from a different source.
Is there any way to grade papers without drowning in red ink?
If you have an answer or just want a place to rant about the horrors of grading
papers, drop by the writing assessment
forum.You'll get sympathy and suggestions from other teachers with similar
problems.
Linda Aragoni
GAA
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