Nonfiction Comprehension Strategies

Want to see my newest favourite resource??

Texts and Lessons for Content-Area Reading by Harvey Daniels and Nancy Steineke. A coworker bought this book last year and I was intrigued. The other day when I was putting in (another) Amazon order, I decided it add it to my list. Last Friday when I arrived home from school the little brown box with the smile on the side was waiting for me with all these goodies inside:

The Texts and Lessons books is PERFECT for those of you trying to incorporate more nonfiction resources into your language program. I think the reading level is best for grades 6 - 8, maybe even 7 - 10 ... I don't think my grade fives could have handled this at the beginning of the year, but they're handling quite well right now (I'm pretty proud of my proficient little readers). I do have a few struggling readers in grade 5 and I have paired them up with a more proficient reader while they read the article. So far, so good.

Each reading strategy (and full lesson) is paired with an interesting nonfiction article (we've done two so far). This week we studied and discussed the strategies of "Turn and Talk" and "Read with a Question in Mind". Each time we have discussed the strategy first - tried it out, read the article, applied the strategy, wrote our findings on a sticky note, and then posted the strategy and our sticky notes on our reading strategy bulletin board. The students are really enjoying the articles, and it's spurning some great "grand conversations" in the classroom. We've also turned the strategy into an "if / then" statement (see pictures below) and have written about them in our strategy notebook (see first picture in this post). I really like the fact that my students really have to THINK and work hard to comprehend the articles - when the reading is too easy, I don't think they really see the benefit of applying the comprehension strategies. They're definitely thinking with these articles - and USING the comprehension strategies to help them.