Strategies to Boost Reading Scores

I am sorry, but I must say the phrase. Common Core.  For some students, the Common Core Assessment is no big deal. For others, it causes frustration.  This blog post provides classroom tested strategies that have boosted the reading performance of below and on-level students.  Even better, the strategies take very little extra preparation.

Strategy 1:
Expose students to extra reading passages, and discuss them for just five minutes a day. 

Benefits
Students build vocabulary knowledge and tackle harder text with extra support.

What to Use:
Daily Common Core Reading Passages or Short passages from magazines.  Organize magazine articles by topic.  Discuss them for a few minutes a day.  Over time, students begin to learn vocabulary words and learn how to tackle harder text.  This is what I did everyday until I created Daily Common Core Reading.

Strategy 2:
Teach thematically.  When I first began teaching, I mostly focused on skills.  Week one we worked on main idea, week two we worked on inferences, etc.  After further research on theme based teaching, I decided to give it a try.  It works!  Even my lowest performing students that had previously struggled for years made great leaps.  I still teach these topics, but I do it now in the context of  a theme such as animal adaptations, how societies or communities change over time, etc.

Strategy 3:
Assess students on how well they apply reading strategies.  Students must explain how a specific passage is connected to an overall theme.  They must explain how ideas in a passage advance the author's main idea or the plot.  Often, students know they should apply strategies, but they do not always consistently use them.

Strategy 4:
Read higher grade level text to students, and encourage them to read specific types of texts.  As soon as I began to read to students (even my older ones), I was able to make them into believers.  I highly encourage using high-interest quick text.  You can use these short high interest stories or read Goosebumps to lower grade level students, Gary Paulson stories to intermediate grade levels, and odd but true stories to middle school students.  Gradually, shift students to reading magazines such as National Geographic for Kids, (selected articles) from the Economist (middle school students), etc. Students have to gradually read more complex text in order to grow as readers.

Strategy 5:
Make use of those dead periods in the day to double dose instruction.  The first ten minutes of the school day, the beginning of a class period, and even the end of the school day are good.  I take those times to give students targeted extra practice at their own levels. This is especially helpful if you have students that do not do read at home.  The extra 15 minutes of targeted reading (with progress charts) adds up and really helps.  

Daily Common Core Reading Passages

Boost Common Core Reading Scores
Common Core Reading

Types of Fallacies in Writing

When some students are asked to explain whether or not an author has fully defended the ideas written in text, some students do not know what to say.  This chart will help.  It lists and describes the different types of fallacies that writers and speakers make.Click Here To Access This Freebie

Literature Choice Boards

I love choice boards so much.  Not only are they fun, but they also appeal to different learning styles.  I created this choice board to use with my middle school students.  The great thing about it is that choice boards can be used with any book.

How to use them:
After assigning a chapter for students to read, ask them to select an activity to complete from the list.  Since there are multiple activities to choose from, students can use the same choice board over and over again.

Access It for Free Here

100 Quick and Daily Grade 6 Daily Common Core Literature and Informational Text Passages

Common Core has just become easier.  This document contains 100 passages that align specially to the Grade 6 Literature and Informational Text Common Core Standards. Informational Text, literature, poetry, fantasy, folktales, plays, suspense stories and more are included.  Click Here For More Information

Benefits

• Review literature skills in between reading novels.  With Daily Common Core, students can review important literature skills and closely read text with quick, daily passages.
• Save time--The reading passages include school friendly themes that are taught in middle school literature such as self-acceptance, resolving conflict, and more.
• Monitor student progress.  The Common Core Standard is written next to each question to make student and teacher progress monitoring easy.  A weekly checklist at the end of each week lists the Common Core skills that were covered.
• Expose students to a variety of genres. The passages include realistic fiction, informational text, poetry, historical fiction, and YA fiction.

The Common Core Standard is written right next to each question to make progress monitoring easier.  This is a great way to quickly review figurative language, inferences, character traits, and more.  Click Here For More Information

Compare and Contrast Themes

There are several elements of a text that a student must pay attention to as they read. Theme is one of them.  Theme is addressed in two of the Common Core Standards. Standard RL.2 asks students to determine the theme of a text.  Standard RL.9 asks students to compare and contrast how authors convey theme.

One way to help students in this area is to have students closely read a text to look for ways than two different authors teach the same theme.  The setting, characterization, and also the choice of characters that an author includes in a text each contribute to helping readers determine what the theme of a text is.

What Does Close Reading Look Like?

Some students truly do not understand what close reading should look like.  These students often fall into one of two camps.  They either highlight everything or nothing at all.

This example of what students should pay attention to while they read is from my Common Core Close Reading Practice passages Click Here.  To help students figure out that is important in a text, I often tell them to look for details that show or tell a character's traits or motive, details that show cause and effect relationships, and details in a plot that elude to a theme.

It takes practice, but after while many students begin to understand what to do.

Click Here For More Information

Sentence Variety (Different Ways to Vary Your Sentences)

When students write, they must pay attention to several aspects of writing as they read. One of those aspects is sentence structure. Using a variety of sentence structures adds flow and makes writing more appealing. 

This blog post includes free task cards to help students remember to use sentence variety.

Free Varying Sentence Structure Task Cards

The Case for Using Sentence Variety
Why should students be concerned about sentence variety?  Writing clear and cohesive sentences is not only a focus point of the new Common Core Standards, it is also a valuable tip that will help students score higher on ACT and SAT exams. Understanding how and when to use different sentence structures not only improves writing, it also helps students understand how authors develop and convey ideas to their readers.

How Authors Use Different Sentence Structures
Varying sentence structures can heighten the tone in a action story.  In informational text, it draws a reader's attention to specific ideas.

In addition to experimenting with different sentence structures, students should analyze the writing structures that authors use.  They can ask questions like:

• How does the author convey tone in the text?
• How does the use of this sentence structure (in paragraph 10) help the speaker be more convincing to listeners?

The Common Core Connection

The Common Core English Standards lead students into deeper levels of analysis as they progress into higher grade levels.  While words such as analyze, think about, and compare are used at the lower and middle grade levels, terms such as diction and syntax are directly used at the high school grade levels to address this deeper level of analysis.
View additional posts on Classroom Freebies

To access close reading task cards from my TpT store, Click Here