Latest Reading Posts from the Blog

Character Traits & Story Events: How to Help Students Discover a Meaningful Connection
You’ve been working with your students on understanding character traits for a while now. They are practically experts at: identifying character traits describing characters finding

Point of View: Why It’s Tricky, Why it Matters, and How to Help Students Understand
For many elementary students, the idea that other people have a different outlook on the world than their own view is pretty new! Kids tend

3 Powerful Strategies to Teach Asking & Answering Questions
Asking and answering questions come naturally to kids! Asking and answering TEXT DEPENDENT questions that can be answered with text evidence or through inference? Welllllllll…not

Central Message Made Easy: 3 Valuable Tips to Help Students “Get It”
The central message of a story is super important for students to be able to identify, but unfortunately can be a tricky concept for kids

5 Qualities Kids Need to Follow Their Dreams
As parents and teachers, one of our goals is to help our children and our students achieve their dreams and to succeed in whatever path

How To Teach Paired Texts in Five Days With a Free Reading Unit
Teaching paired texts is quite a feat. There’s so much to cover! This task can also be overwhelming for students because they’re required to integrate

Nonfiction Made Easy! 5 Tips for Hitting the Standards
Upper elementary nonfiction standards naturally scaffold with the intent to take students from recognition of nonfiction features and the author’s craft and structure to the

4 Easy Ways to Teach Your Students to Compare and Contrast Theme
Most students are pretty familiar with how to complete the task of comparing and contrasting two books on their own accurately. When we do a

5 Ways to Make Teaching Cause and Effect Fun
You see a pair of broken glasses. What happened? Why did it happen? You see an ice cream cone on the ground. What happened? Why

Important Steps to Teach Paired Passages
The focus on teaching paired passages has undoubtedly grown within the last decade or so. As the landscape of education has changed, students within elementary

How to Deal with Context Clues
There’s no argument that strong vocabulary skills make kids better readers. But how do we get even our most reluctant, struggling reader to dive deeper into

The Main Idea Strategy That Will Help Students Win Big
If you teach upper elementary, you’ve probably had the pleasure of trying to teach students the difference between the main idea and the