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

Let’s 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 each paragraph 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:

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.

The next step is to use that material in a formal writing prompt. I just happen to have a writing prompt on the subject of active and passive voice that you can download free if you subscribe to Writing Points ezine.

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 outline repeatedly with only minor adjustments.