A mnemonic is an instructional strategy designed to help students improve their memory of important information. This technique connects new learning to prior knowledge through the use of visual and/or acoustic cues. The basic types of...

The Frayer Model is a strategy that uses a graphic organizer for vocabulary building. This technique requires students to (1) define the target vocabulary words or concepts, and (2) apply this information by generating examples and...

Young scholars will practice the reading comprehension skill of visualizing. Teachers will model the skill with All the Places to Love by Patricia MacLachlan. Then students will listen to Robert Service's poem "The Shooting of Dan...

The national literacy initiative, Reading Rockets, provides information and resources on how students learn to read, why so many struggle, and how educators can help.

This site features an article that looks at the importance of phonemic awareness as an early step to learning to read. Teachers will benefit from the information presented within this article.

Key to learning how to read is the ability to identify the different sounds that make words and to associate these sounds with written words. There are 44 phonemes in the English language, including letter combinations such as /th/,...

Hosted by Fred Rogers, The Roots of Reading looks at the earliest stages of literacy in such locations as a baby speech lab and a Head Start center. The program examines how parents, childcare providers, and kindergarten teachers can get...

Hosted by Reba McEntire, "Toddling Toward Reading" examines what it takes to give preschoolers the early literacy skills they need to become successful readers. Features children's book author and illustrator Sandra Boynton, whose...

This module provides strategies to use with informational text. Teachers will explicitly teach students about graphic organizers to use before reading informtational texts.

Power Notes is a strategy that teaches students an efficient form of organizing information from assigned text. This technique provides students a systematic way to look for relationships within material they are reading. Power Notes...

Contains plans for a lesson plan that will provide learners with strategies for spelling unfamiliar words. Students are asked to use phonological awareness and visual recall, analyze alternative spellings, and use a variety of resources...

This strategy asks students to draw the main ideas in a text.

This series of videos and interactive activities provide an excellent set of resources for teaching or learning the 8 research based reading strategies provided here. After receiving your "key" you can investigate the features inside and...

A ten-part learning module with links to images, videos, and texts about reading strategies.

A five-part learning module with links to images and web sites to help student improve reading comprehension by visualizing.

This is a teachers' guide to teaching students how to use keywords and visualization as tools to help them remember important facts. This PDF file provides a list of materials necessary for the lesson, as well as a script and tips for...

Reading unit plan focusing on picture books. It contains ten days worth of teaching suggestions that use a variety of reading strategies including modeled as well as independent reading and writing. Also includes five printable...

Come and learn more about these awesome phonemic activities for the preschool or elementary classroom.

What are the major roles in literature circles? Check out this site to learn more about the individual roles needed to form a literature circle. Includes links to various reading handouts and lessons.

The Semantic Feature Analysis strategy engages students in reading assignments by asking them to relate selected vocabulary to key features of the text. This technique uses a matrix to help students discover how one set of things is...

Story Maps are used for teaching students to work with story structure for better comprehension. This technique uses visual representations to help students organize important elements of a story. Students learn to summarize the main...

Explicitly teach a collection of competencies that will help students think through, think about, and think with pictures.

What do you know about phoneme activities for collaborative classrooms? This site will show how to develop your own activities to sharpen your students phonemic awareness skills. This informative resource will support any teacher's work...

How can you use decodable text in your classroom? This site offers insight into this necessary part of the reading process. Come and learn more.