Category · 204 articles
Literacy Centers
How to Teach Essay Strategies
Coaching writing, especially essay strategies, is a lot like coaching football. We are all product-centered. We need to have the culminating event in mind, be it…
How to Determine Reading Levels
Degrees of Reading Power (DRP)? Fleish-Kincaid? Lexiles? Accelerated Reader ATOS? Reading Recovery Levels? Fry’s Readability? John’s Basic Reading Inventory? Standardized test data? Each of these measures…
How to Teach Conjunctions
Upper elementary, middle school, and high school students will need more examples of all three types of conjunctions to assist in accurate identification, and more importantly,…
Grammar Instruction: Establishing Common Ground
Perhaps no instructional issue in English-language arts produces more contentious debate than the issue of how best to teach grammar. All too often we bog down…
How to Teach Grammar
Within the field of English-language arts, there is probably no more contentious curricular issue than that of how to teach grammar. The “Reading Wars” and “Writing…
The 18 Reasons Not to Use Accelerated Reader
Accelerated Reader (AR) is a simple software concept that was at the right time (late 1980s) and right place (public schools during a transition from whole…
How to Teach Prepositional Phrases
Wouldn't it make sense to spend instructional time on the part of speech that constitutes 30% of all writing? Prepositional phrases are used that much. The…
Teach Content Reading
A growing trend with Response to Intervention models is to expand the reading block to more than two hours per day. Elementary reading is reductive. More…