In this course national trainer Mary Beth Allen and other experienced primary-grade educators use research-based, classroom-proven strategies and activities to strengthen young students' reading comprehension. Teachers provide explicit instruction on predicting and inferring, visualizing, and determining the important content in informational text during read-aloud, shared reading, and guided reading lessons.
Making inferences, visualizing, and determining which facts and ideas are important can be daunting tasks for young readers. In this course you'll observe teachers and students, grades K-2, working with practical strategies that help children access the thinking skills they need to comprehend text at deeper levels. No matter what reading program you are using, you will be able to incorporate these approaches and improve students' comprehension.
You will learn how to:
- make optimum use of modeling as a powerful means of teaching comprehension skills to students, grades K-2
- strengthen young students’ ability to comprehend below the surface of the text
- ensure that students’ predictions and inferences are grounded in text and serve to enhance their understanding of the material
- effectively use questioning to generate and sustain young students' inferential thinking
- transport students into text using simple, engaging visual reenactments
- help students transition from concrete visuals to mental visualization of characters, settings, and actions
- enrich students’ understanding of characters’ thoughts, motivations, and emotions through the use of visual representations
Watch an excerpt from this course:
"Great Course! The content was extremely helpful and along with the addition of the printable resources affords me the knowledge to make changes in my classroom."
– B. Agurkis
"I found the course informative and the format very user friendly. Thank you."
– E. Dinovitzer
"I really appreciated the strategies in this course. The stress on informational test was very helpful. Comprehension must be a skill they view as part of life not just something you do in school. Making visual pictures in my head is how I have always read. I never knew how I learned to do it but now I have strategies so I can teach my students how."
– A. Boggess
"I appreciate all the ways to teach reading comprehension strategies and it inspires me to go the extra mile to encourage the student to actively participate in learning and comprehending. I enjoyed this course. Thank you."
– K. Marciniak
