| Armed with the tools to become better readers, students need opportunities to attack reading passages on their own.
After-Reading Discussions One of the best ways to explore new ideas is to talk about them. Effective classroom discussions can improve recall and overall comprehension. In an effective discussion, you will hear students employ important metacognitive strategies, such as questioning, paraphrasing, and retelling.
Students develop effective discussion habits through practice and feedback. Invite a guided reading group into the "fishbowl" with you to have a discussion while the rest of the class observes. Ask students to notice:
- questions that prompt reflections.
- ways participants back up their opinions.
- questions that encourage students to build on each other's ideas.
Summarization: A Valuable After-Reading Strategy Since summarizing requires synthesizing the most important ideas in a text, student summaries are good assessments of their comprehension. Determine if students are focusing on the most important ideas, or getting bogged down in details. If students are summarizing orally or in writing, guide them to:
- distinguish between important and supportive ideas.
- restate the main ideas of a selection.
- condense information.
- put information into their own words.
After-Reading Word Work After students have read a selection is a good time to focus on some of the new vocabulary they've learned. Still in their guided-reading groups, students can work with pre-selected vocabulary words in any number of ways: performing Speed Drills to improve their fluency, Syllable Sorts to correctly break down multi-syllabic words, activities to help them understand affixes. (See Related Resources for this module.)
After-Reading Fluency Building Research has shown that oral reading is very important for the developing reader. Younger readers need to hear themselves read, and they benefit from frequent adult feedback and guidance. Students need to have a fluent model "in their ears and head" with which to evaluate and improve their reading. The most common techniques for practicing fluency are:
- Partner Reading: Carefully selected student pairs read and reread text, offering corrective feedback and monitoring speed.
- Echo Reading: A teacher or skilled student reader reads aloud a text, piece by piece, as the partner or small group repeats using the same pace, intonation, and phrasing.
- Choral Reading: Students read simultaneously a piece of text, such as a poem.
- Readers Theater: Partners or small groups practice and perform a dramatic reading of a text or portion of text.
Special Education Focus: Identifying Important Ideas
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Poor readers often have trouble summarizing because they cannot tell the main ideas from the less important details in an information structure. They may need help with simple classification exercises, such as reordering a list of related things into categories, or completing a simple outline or conceptual map. The teacher can:
- put each idea discussed on an index card.
- encourage students, working in pairs, to sort the ideas into at least three levels: most important overall points, next most important, and less important details.
- ask students to arrange their cards as they would an outline, with the most important ideas becoming the topic sentences for paragraphs.
- compose a paragraph together that is organized around the information structure created with the index cards.
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