We want students to understand stories as more than a bunch of structural blocks. Stories are really about conflict, and story maps don’t get at this idea very well. I developed a technique, character perspective charting, that helps kids to summarize the conflicts among characters.
When kids get the opportunity to discuss something with a partner before responding to a teacher question, positive outcomes have been seen in the primary grades in reading and in the upper grades with second-language learners.
Vocabulary learning is incremental and there are more words that kids need to learn than we can teach. Kids need lots of opportunities to confront words in their reading and listening.
Having classes/groups of students read common texts with teacher scaffolding is a good idea, whether we are talking about the reading of a short story in an English class or a chapter from a science book. They can promote mature interpretations of particular texts or the development of comprehension strategies.
Instruction in how to make sense of sentences can play an important role in reading comprehension. For example, when students struggle with sentences written in the passive voice, teach with some texts that use this construction.
