Archive
Tag: Mark Pennington
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…
Strange, but True: “Stuffed Animals Increase Reading Levels”
According to Riddering, students were given a stuffed animal as a "reading buddy" and were encouraged to read to their buddy. Because of this method, reading…
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…
Teaching Fact and Opinion: When, What, and How
Helping students understand and apply the differences between fact and opinion is crucial to analytical reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Distinguishing between fact from opinion is…
How to Differentiate Instruction
With the Response to Intervention (RTI) model now being incorporated into many school districts today, it has become increasingly important to help frame the differentiated instruction…
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,…
Assessment-Based Differentiated Instruction
Our understanding of the characteristics and proclivities of our students should inform both the what and the how of instruction. Consider this: students don’t know what…
Reading Intervention: How to Beat the Odds
To beat the odds indicating that only one-in-six remedial readers will ever "catch up" to grade level, we need to analyze what has not worked and…