Latest Reading Posts from the Blog

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

The Ultimate Guide to Reading Workshop Mini-Lessons
If you’ve been teaching reading using a Reading Workshop model, you already know that the mini-lesson is a key component! This quick but oh-so-important part

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

How to Organize Reading Workshop’s Share Time
Out of all the components of Reading Workshop, Share Time often gets the least attention. It is after all only 5 – 10 minutes long.

Why You NEED to Use Interactive PDF Games
Classrooms have been turned upside down and inside out these past few years. Teachers everywhere are longing for routine and a return to normalcy. I

Target Reading Strategies with Digital Reading Units
*Looking for the freebies? Scroll down to the bottom of this post! Whether you love technology or are a reluctant technology user, the truth is

20 Diverse Children’s Books for the Classroom
More than ever, it’s important for teachers (and for parents) to help children understand that ALL people should be celebrated. Whether the person looks like