Essential Deep Reading Skills for 2019-2020
By Jonathan LeMaster on July 1, 2019It seems like everything in education comes back around if you wait long enough. PBL (a modern twist on Project Based Learning from the 70s and 80s) is a good example of this phenomenon. Now, explicit instruction seems to be making a comeback. Who and what is behind these trends and fads in education is an enigma to me (I guess we should follow the money), but one goal seems to never change: Improve students' abilities to read, speak, and write. It's that simple.
Non-profit organizations in education, colleges and universities, and businesses all agree that students need to get better at reading, collaborating, and writing for multiple purposes and to multiple audiences. For this eCoach, I will outline a list of essential deep reading skills that can help all students become stronger readers. Explicitly teaching reading is one of LiteracyTA's strengths. Explicitly teaching reading is about making transparent what good readers do. Then, classroom teachers give students time to practice these reading skills that they are learning. You want explicit instruction? We can help.
9 Essential Deep Reading Skills
- Set a purpose for reading
- Predict the main idea
- Make inferences
- Pause to predict
- Determine meanings of words and phrases
- Identify main ideas and key details
- Identify opinions and reasons (or claims and evidence)
- Identify point of view
- Analyze text structure
This list should be somewhat familiar to you because it reflects your state literacy standards. Sometimes it is nice to distill what we are trying to teach into a simple list like this. For the 2019-2020 (can you believe it) school year, I recommend focusing on these 9 essential deep reading skills. These skills can be taught in any class and with any content.
What tools and resources are available through LiteracyTA? How can we help with explicit reading instruction?
Reading Process and Reading Lessons
Student Handouts, Videos, Rubrics, and More
This summer, consider making these 9 essential deep reading skills the focus of your curriculum. Divide them up over the year. Start with two or three skills and add skills as students develop mastery. Remember, these skills can be taught with any text, making it easier for you to explicitly teach and rehearse skills all year.
Happy Planning,
Jonathan
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We've mapped our literacy lessons and reading, speaking, and writing skills to state standards, Common Core, and NGSS. The standards are "the what" to teach. Our lessons are "the how" to meet the expectations defined by the standards. Click on the links below to view our quick reference table that maps standards to literacy lessons.
