We found this short clip featuring Dr. Timothy Shanahan helpful in understanding how the ELA Common Core Standards place a greater emphasis on complex text. Are you optimistic that the new Common Core Standards will improve reading instruction? Watch the video and share your thoughts: More Resources for Common Core: Common Core Standards Initiative Support the Common Core with Genre Books for Grades 3-8+ Support the Common Core with Genre Big Books for Grades K-2
It’s showtime! Everyone’s hard work during the past few days has led up to a performance. Since performers frequently do their best work in front of a live audience, invite students to present the script to their classmates, schoolmates, teachers, parents/guardians, office staff and principal, and other members of the community. Remember, however, that reader’s theater scripts are NOT to be memorized. Performance is done “book in hand,” as when actors do a staged reading of a play. Still, it is a live performance. And the same performing-without-a-net energy that makes live theater so vital can turn into an actor’s nightmare. Here are...
Read More Post a comment (0)It would be difficult to overstate the importance of academic vocabulary to our students’ success in reading, the content areas, and beyond. In Reading, Writing and Learning in ESL (2005), Suzanne Peregoy and Owen Boyle frame it this way: What we know in any content area is distilled in the vocabulary we own in that subject. In other words, our academic vocabulary, the words we control, manipulate, and communicate with, reflect the content we know at the conceptual level. For all of our ELs, but most especially those who enter the country in middle or high school, academic vocabulary acquisition is a...
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