Strategies That Work - Stenhouse Publishers via kwout

Have you read Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis’s Strategies that Work? The first edition is pictured above (the second edition, 2007) is green. It’s one of those book about reading comprehension that makes light bulbs go off in my head about ways to enhance students’ comprehension using authentic texts. I’ve always harbored a belief that it is a key text for school librarians, and Carmen Pianko agreed (we even have the same favorite quote).

Check out her Prezi outlining the key strategies of the book and active steps school librarians can take to support students’ reading comprehension skills in a deep, meaningful way.

More and more, I think that “reading comprehension” is a near-synonym for “information literacy.” The overlaps are scarily strong. Take a look and see what you think!

And if you enjoy it, drop Carmen a note!

In the March issue of SLM, Birmingham (MI) elementary school librarians Julie Green and Laurie Olmsted talked about the reading comprehension books they read in their efforts to transform and deepen the library learning for their primary students. One great book is The Daily 5, by Boushey and Moser.

Haven’t read it? Take a look at my student Caitlin Campbell’s excellent book review, which covers the key ideas of The Daily 5 and gives specific recommendations for how librarians can integrate the strategies into their work.

It’s less than five minutes long, so I hope you’ll take the time to enjoy it. If you like it, will you leave Caitlin a note? Thanks!

GoAnimate.com: The Daily 5 by caitcamp

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It’s free and fun!

This spring, I worked with a group of first graders on summarizing. It’s a hard skill to teach, I think.  You know it when you see it … but where are the mentor texts?

We worked on it by making lists of group “main ideas” and then slowly taking them away one at a time until we couldn’t take anything else away, but it could have been instructional luck as much as anything else.

Melissa suggests this Lego stop-motion animation video – the entirety of Star Wars in three minutes as a great source to model what effective summaries look like.  Plus, if you’re a stop-motion animation fan like my students and I are, you get the bonus of seeing some really stellar work (no pun intended).