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Tag: strategies
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Guest Post: Ashleigh Cavalin – Practical Reading Strategies for Romeo & Juliet
Now that Practical Reading Strategies has been out in the wild for a few months, I’ve started to receive feedback from teachers around how they’re using the book in their classrooms. This post is courtesy of Ashleigh Cavalin at Kilvington Grammar School. Ashleigh has taken PRS and adapted the activities to target her audience of young male…
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Creating a Culture of Reading
When I wrote Practical Reading Strategies I focused the entire first half of the book on providing instantly usable activities that a teacher could pick up and take into the classroom, adopting and extending them to suit their own students. But in the second half of the book, things get a little more philosophical, and…
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VCE English 2023: Mentor Texts and Ideas
This is the fourth in a series of posts on the upcoming 2023 VCE English and EAL Study Design. For the first three posts, see the links at the end. Mentor Texts In the new Study Design mentor texts are “Texts to be read and re-read as models of effective and cohesive writing.” They are…
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Pulling it all together
This is the sixth in a series of posts related to the six Strategies covered in my book Practical Reading Strategies. You can buy a copy of the book here. Check out the previous four posts on Making Connections, Visualising, Questioning, Inferring and Summarising. Synthesising is the final of the six Reading Strategies. As I…
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In your own words
This is the fifth in a series of posts related to the six Strategies covered in my book Practical Reading Strategies. You can buy a copy of the book here. Check out the previous four posts on Making Connections, Visualising, Questioning, and Inferring. Summarising involves recalling the main events or ideas from a text. The…
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Reading between the lines
This is the fourth in a series of posts related to the six Strategies covered in my book Practical Reading Strategies. You can buy a copy of the book here. Check out the previous three posts on Making Connections, Visualising, and Questioning. Inferring means ‘reading between the lines’. In practice, however, it’s one of the…
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Making Connections
This is the first in a series of posts related to the six Strategies covered in my book Practical Reading Strategies. You can buy a copy of the book here. The six Reading Strategies offer a way of teaching reading for meaning which goes beyond simple comprehension or teacher-led questioning. Making Connections, the first Strategy,…
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Making the most of Head Start
As term 4 draws to a close, many schools will have some form of Head Start or acceleration program for senior students. For our school, that means our Y11s move up to their Y12 classes for the final fortnight of term. For new senior teachers, this might be the first time you have encountered a…
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Activity spotlight: One minutes, three minutes, five minutes, write!
This is a great activity for encouraging students to do more than just glance at a text before trying to write a response, or answer a direct question. A lot of the time, our students want to rush ahead and just, “get the job done,” when we really want them to provide a thoughtful response.…
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Finding Writing Models
If you’ve read any of my other posts, you’ll know that I’m a huge fan of using quality writing models in the English classroom for everything from creative writing to an alternative to the dreaded TEEL. And I’m not alone in thinking that one of the best ways to learn how to write well is…