Making inferences or “reading between the lines” can be one of the trickier skills for students to adapt into their literacy toolkit. I teach my students that when they infer, they are taking the explicit information that the text gives them and combining it with their own thoughts and interpretations based on textual clues to […]

Comedic sketches, parodies, and stand-up comedy are a big part of the entertainment that our students tend to consume, yet it’s tricky to incorporate these genres into the classroom due to the sometimes inappropriate nature of the material. It can be time consuming to search through the endless content on YouTube to find one video […]

Teaching students to visualize while they read is an essential skill in becoming an active reader because it enables them to make inferences while they read, recall and summarize the text, and make a deeper connection to the text by visually demonstrating their unique interpretation of it. While some students love the opportunity to get […]

While reading and viewing, I find that my students have difficulty maintaining focus, so one of the strategies I use to help them be more active readers and viewers is predicting. Making predictions boosts engagement because students are more invested in what they are reading, to see if their predictions were correct. Placemat Predictions Before […]

Incorporating strategies into your lessons for making connections to literature will help students to become more engaged readers and develop the ability to comprehend texts on different levels. Each of these strategies, broken down into text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections can be used in the classroom or adapted for online learning by creating breakout rooms […]