M10: Additional Considerations for Teaching Reading

  A variety of strategies intentionally designed to address specific skills, such as comprehension, critical thinking, and phonetics are important to include when teaching reading. During your lesson, those might include using graphic organizers or reader responses. Post reading, such activities might include  Reader's Theater and Word Study.

In reality, as the expert in your classroom, you will be able to see uses for these strategies throughout the teaching and learning process. There is no artificial barrier that says a strategy can only be used at one specific point. 

The following pages cover some critical information about comprehension strategies and word work, including phonological awareness and phonics instruction. You will also explore one of the tools used to asses student reading called a Running Record. Running records can be particularly enlightening when assessing an EL's reading because you can often determine strengths in his/her native language as you analyze the English reading. You will also have more instruction in these areas in your Elementary Field Block, but we need to talk about some of the concepts here as well.

NOTE:  The words in bold on this page (and any pages in these modules) are important concepts that could be on your TExES exam, quizzes, and final exam in this course.