Literacy Instructional Strategies
“Strategies are those scaffolds we share with kids to make the invisible thinking process visible.”
-Kylene Beers, Reading Nonfiction
Too often, when we start with strategies, we are asking students to follow instructions, rather than teaching them transferable metacognitive processes. As you select a strategy, remember that the ultimate goal is for students to read independently, without worksheets or graphic organizers.
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A graphic organizer help students:
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Identify main ideas and supporting details
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Write summaries
Adapting a Text for the Classroom
A guide to adapting a text to the level of your students
A guided approach to helping students consider their learning goals and the best way to organize information.
Anchor Read Apply
A comprehension strategy for emergent readers
A tool to help students engage their brains and read with purpose.
Explaining Textual Evidence
A mini lesson to help students understand how textual evidence makes their ideas and arguments stronger AND to help them explain that evidence.
GIST Statement
A tool to help students thoughtfully summarize.
A guided approach to helping students make inferences.
An opportunity for whole-group teaching involving all students. The teacher selects a text, plans for conversations and makes decisions about when they will occur during the lesson.
A strategy to help students set a clear purpose for reading, driven by their curiosity and to support students in following through on their questions after reading.
A guided approach to helping students identify main ideas.
A process of active reading, marking the text (or annotation) is most successful when used to support students in reading purposefully. This metacognitive strategy helps students read closely and independently.
A strategy to help students approach reading thoughtfully
We use many of the same skills to read images as we do to read texts with words. This is a student-facing presentation on how to read a photo.
Reading to Learn
Strategies to support students in reading for information
This template is designed to facilitate student-driven learning through research. It is designed for use with middle and high school students
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All readers, but especially emergent readers, need to read independently to increase their print processing skills. This is a bank of resources and activities to help.
Games to help students learn their letter sounds.
Use it for:
Phonics
Multisensory Approaches to word work
One Letter a Day/Enhanced Alphabet Knowledge
"A method of practical instruction that teachers can use to organize, plan, and teach the essential skills of alphabet knowledge. EAK emphasizes identifying the letter name and sound, recognizing the letter in text, and producing the letter form."
This approach helps students learn to use known words (keywords) and word parts to read and spell other words. Combine with a systematic making words approach and a daily word wall.
Use it for:
Phonics, Spelling
Rhyming Words:
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Ask “do pail – tail rhyme”
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Give me a word that rhymes with bat
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Finish the rhyme red bed, blue _______.
Syllables
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Clap to the word parts in rainbow
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Ask to count the word parts in, airplane, table, porcupine, communication
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Have them blend syllables bub+ble, mit+ten, ro+bot.
Onset and Rime
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ask what rhymes with pig and starts with /d/? book /c/, dig /r/, dog, /fr/
Sound Isolation
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Model by saying I hear a /j/ at the beginning of jump
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What is the beginning sound in neck, mat, that
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What do you hear in the middle of kitten
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What do you hear at the end of jog
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Tell me what two words begin with the same sounds, keep, king, jump or peach, frog, pile
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Listen to each group of words and tell me which have the same beginning sounds, teeth, goat, fish, tub.
Blending
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I say it slowly you say it fast, /c/ /a/ /t/
Segmentation
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How many sounds do you hear in the word dog
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What sounds do you hear in the word man
Manipulation
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What word would we have if we changed the /t/ in Tommy to and /m/
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What word would we have if we left out the /t/ in the middle of stand?
Pictures of Words that Start With...
Exactly what it sounds like. These are pictures of words that start with each letter of the alphabet, so you don't have to seek them out.
This is one of the most structured and systematic ways to demonstrate writing and provide engaging instruction in print conventions to students that are emergent (Erickson & Koppenhaver, 2020)
Rocket Rhymes
A pear deck game for matching rhyming words
A game to play with students to support development of phonemic awareness and phonics skills.
A bank of ideas to help you maximize your use of word walls. New ideas added weekly!
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All readers, but especially emergent readers, need to read independently to increase their print processing skills. This is a bank of resources and activities to help.
Word Study and Fluency: Rasinski
A bank of ideas to help you maximize your use of word walls. New ideas added weekly!
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Think about what a successful student in your class should be able to do at the end of the hour. What concepts should they be able to apply? What kinds of analysis should they be able to perform? What kind of writing should they be able to do? What types of problems should they be solving? Learning intentions provide a means for clearly describing these things to learners, creating a meaningful educational experience.
Effective feedback helps students see what they know and what they need to keep working on
Engaging with Text
An overview of process and strategies to help students engage more deeply when they read.
Literacy Conferences
A literacy conference is a guided conversation that gives the student a chance to show you who they are as a reader and a person and facilitates safe moments of connection.
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Collaborative Vocabulary Activities
Activities to get students working together to learn new vocabulary words.
Deep Processing of Academic Vocabulary Words
Daily activities to help students deepen their knowledge of new vocabulary words.
Strategies to help students independently figure out the meanings of unknown words
Integrating Vocabulary Throughout the Day
Students need regular exposure to new vocabulary words and the correct ways to use them. These activities will help you integrate new words throughout the school day.
LINCs
Help students learn and retain the meaning of important words. Includes a way to review new vocabulary.
Fifty words that provide examples of the most common prefixes and suffixes, as well as common spelling changes.
There are more words in the English language than one person could learn in a lifetime. This is a behind-the-scenes tool to help you select the ones to focus on.
Quick games and activities to review vocabulary words.
Word Study and Fluency: Rasinski
A bank of ideas to help you maximize your use of word walls. New ideas added weekly!
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Writing Strategies
A guided approach to helping students identify main ideas and summarize texts. The graphic organizer itself is only a piece of this tool. For success, model the process in detail, and follow up with ongoing instruction and practice using increasingly challenging examples.
Use it for:
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Identifying main ideas and supporting details
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Writing summaries
A guided approach to helping students consider their learning goals and the best way to organize information.
Use it for:
Empowering students to choose a graphic organizer to suit their needs.
Explaining Textual Evidence
Your students need to cite evidence from the text in the form of key details and quotations. Now what? Use this mini lesson to help them understand how textual evidence makes their ideas and arguments stronger AND to help them explain that evidence.
Practice Guides: Teaching Students to Write Effectively
Research supported guidelines for teaching writing to elementary and secondary students.
A writing framework to help students process content knowledge while considering audience, purpose and format.
A tool to help students process new academic content in preparation for a writing assignment.
A process that enhances the quality of student writing by having students read and revise their work.
What students actually write isn't always the same as what they think they've written. When they take the time to review their writing, they often find that important words are missing or that their ideas aren't as clear as they thought. Stop, Read, Revise prepares students to root out mistakes and communicate more effectively by training them to review and revise their writing using a specific set of criteria.
Writing a Paragraph
A student-facing presentation that breaks down the paragraph writing process sentence by sentence.
A collection of customizable writing frames that can be used to assess students' content knowledge, develop specific writing skills, and promote regular writing.
These frames and prompts can be used to:
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Assess students' understanding of key content/texts at any point in a learning sequence
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Give students practice crafting the kinds of writing pieces that standardized tests require
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Develop and test a variety of thinking/writing skills
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