Monday, October 24, 2016

What Do Skilled Readers Do?

This question could be answered in many ways. Skilled readers use a variety of strategies to determine the meaning of unknown words, increase their comprehension, and overall connect with their reading. Skilled readers also understand which stance they need to take based on the genre of the material they are reading.

Recently the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students have discovered that one of the strategies that skilled readers use is to think beyond the text. Students have discovered that some information is provided right in the reading, but that other information needs to be inferred. This means that students need to use the information from the text and their own knowledge and experiences to draw conclusions about the text. By doing this students are able to connect more deeply with the text, form their own opinions/ideas, and increase their comprehension. To demonstrate their understanding of this strategy students have read short, informational articles and responded to constructed response questions where they stated a claim, supported their claim with evidence from the text and provided further commentary to support their claim. This has allowed students to begin to think and respond more critically to text.



No comments:

Post a Comment