Product Overview
From acclaimed educators and best-selling authors Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey comes Teaching Reading: Mastering the Fundamentals, a series of four laminated guides that provide teachers with essential information and strategies for teaching students in grades K-6 how to read. The guides, which are designed to be used sequentially as a set but can also be stand-alone resources for targeting certain components of teaching reading, draw from the latest research and present practical, powerful strategies that teachers can utilize right away in their classrooms.
This guide, #4 in the series, focuses on methods for building comprehension and verbal reasoning in elementary students. Understanding a text requires the application of a variety of reading comprehension skills, strategies, and knowledge. And while word recognition, decoding, and fluency are contributors to reading, they are not guarantees of reading comprehension (Spencer & Wagner, 2108). Verbal reasoning is central to deep comprehension, especially in drawing inferences. This guide provides information about reading comprehension and verbal reasoning instruction for elementary students, including:
- the influence of engagement, motivation and agency
- explicit comprehension strategies
- modeling comprehension strategies using think-alouds
- the seven elements of effective interactive read-alouds
- the verbal reasoning skills of referents and determiners, and forward and backward inferences.
- teaching how text is organized using narrative story maps and informational text structures
- a quad text set approach to text selection
- close reading protocol for more complex texts
- text-based discussions
- using text-dependent questions to foster comprehension
