Access lessons and resources to help teach students active reading strategies such as finding the main idea, activating prior knowledge, jot notes, making predictions, and more!

This page features ready-to-use thinking routines to help scaffold and support student thinking.

Grade 7 and 8 teachers: Access a large variety of fiction and non-fiction texts that are specifically created for shared reading in the classroom. All texts follow the theme of “Overcoming Challenges” and focus on a variety of reading strategies such as inferencing, finding the main idea, synthesizing, and analyzing.

Help students develop a deep understand of the text’s form, craft, and meaning by using these close reading teaching strategies and resources.

The why and how behind book clubs, along with engaging activities to help students dive deeper into fiction texts.

Reading Comprehension Strategies

Challenge the Text helps students ask and answer their own text-dependent questions by taking multiple perspectives and uncovering assumptions and biases within the text.

In Reading Against the Grain students analyze the dominant reading of a text and engage in alternative or "resistant" readings. Resistant readings scrutinize the beliefs and attitudes that typically go unexamined in a text, drawing attention to the gaps, silences and contradictions.

Shared reading combines aspects of guided reading and read-aloud strategies. During shared reading, a teacher or proficient student reads the text aloud, pausing at pre-selected moments to discuss content and analyze the text. This strategy facilitates close reading of a complex text in small or whole group settings.

This strategy exposes students to multiple short pieces of a text before they read it in its entirety. Students read selected quotes out of context and comment on both the selection and the comments of other students. The activity ends with students reflecting on their reactions to and predictions about the text.

Readers must refer back to the central text to answer text-dependent questions and provide evidence from the reading to support their answers. Students provide accurate, relevant and complete evidence. To do this well, students will often need to re-read the text several times. This approach privileges the text over prior knowledge, personal experience and pre-reading activities.

Thinking notes are text annotations (highlights, underlines or symbols made on the text or in the margins) that document student thinking during reading. Depending on how you structure the task, these notes can indicate agreement, objection, confusion or other relevant reactions to the text.

This task helps students consider if the text is a window or a mirror through practicing literacy skills and using technology. Students will decide if author, speaker, characters or content in a text reflect students’ lived experiences (mirror) or provide a window into the lived experiences of people whose identities differ from the students’. 

Think Aloud requires readers to stop during their reading to think, reflect and discuss their process. Readers talk about skipping text, rereading, searching back in the text for information, questioning, clarifying, summarizing, making connections, reflecting, predicting and visualizing.

Why Focus on Background Knowledge? 

“When students have more content knowledge before they read, their understanding is better during reading. That knowledge can also make a hard text easier.”

~ Lupo et al, 2018. Building Background Knowledge Through Reading: Rethinking Text Sets. P435. 

Why Build a Quad Text Set? 

• Built to address the reading stressors

• Multiple texts on the same topic

• Multiple texts with varying degree of difficulty

• Multiple texts to support a challenging, target text

• Designed specifically to build background knowledge

• Designed for use with all learners but in particular, struggling readers

• Can incorporate the use of multi-modal texts 

Reading Comprehension Practice

Finding the Main Idea

Copy and paste the link to share with students (Open with iPad in Keynote): https://bit.ly/3SY9ScL

Copy and paste the link below to share practice text with students (Open in Keynote): https://bit.ly/3IiFFjv

Copy and paste the link below to share practice texts with students (Open in Keynote): https://bit.ly/3qvN5tL

Visualizing the Text

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Copy and paste the link to share with students (Open with iPad in Keynote): https://bit.ly/3u3K6bv

Copy and paste the link to share with students (Open with iPad in Keynote): https://bit.ly/3CQSC3D

Copy and paste the link to share with students (Open with iPad in Keynote): https://bit.ly/3S7hOYg

Predicting and Confirming

Copy and paste the link to share with students (Open with iPad in Keynote): https://bit.ly/3etWRsA

SETTING UP A BOOK CLUB

Click the image to access this presentation from the 2023 Summer Symposium. Checkout the speakers notes for additional links and resources.

POSSIBLE BOOK CHOICES

Copy and paste the link below to share workbook with students (Open in Pages): https://bit.ly/3F1UDbw

During Reading Strategies

After Reading Strategies

Teacher-Led Learning Activity

Jot Notes: Lesson

Additional Resources

An Introduction to Jot Notes:

• What are jot notes/annotations?

• How annotating aligns with literacy

• Why should students use jot notes?

• Examples of uses

• Jot notes as the third teacher

Teacher-Led Learning Activities

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Copy and paste the link below to share practice with students (Open in Keynote): https://bit.ly/3qvN5tL

Graphic Organizers

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Copy and paste the link below to share an editable template with students (Open in Keynote): https://bit.ly/30fVkze

Copy and paste the link below to share practice text with students (Open in Keynote): https://bit.ly/3IiFFjv

Copy and paste the link to share with students (Open with iPad in Keynote): https://bit.ly/3SY9ScL

Copy and paste the link below to share practice texts with students (Open in Keynote): https://bit.ly/3qvN5tL

Graphic Organizers and Thinking Routines

KWL Plus Charts

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Think, Puzzle, Explore

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See, Think, Wonder

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Think, Pair, Share

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Frayer Model for Vocabulary Development

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Word Study Diagram

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Graphic Organizers and Thinking Routines

Predicting based on character traits

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Predicting Before Reading

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Confirming Predictions After Reading

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What Makes You Say That?

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Read Aloud, Think Aloud

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Powerful Predictions

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Predicting and Confirming

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Anticipation Guide

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Synthesizing

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 Making Connections

Teacher-Led Learning Activities

Making Connections: Intro Lesson

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How to Make Connections

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Why is it Important to Make Connections?

Making Text-to-Self Connections

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Making Text-to-Text Connections

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Making Text-to-World Connections

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Making Text-to-Self Connections

Making Text-to-Text Connections

Making Text-to-World Connections

The following shared reading lessons were created with the specific purpose of providing students with a scaffolded approach for:

• practicing various reading comprehension strategies

• practicing how to cite evidence from the text

• providing students with higher order thinking questions to help prepare them for the OSSLT.

For each of the texts below, educators will have access to:

• A Mind’s On activity to start the lesson, including success criteria

• A digital student copy of the text (Keynote file or PDF)

• A digital teacher copy of the text with a variety of prompts for shared reading. (Keynote file or PDF)

• 3 questions of varying difficulty (mild, medium, spicy) based on the reading strategy being taught

• Discussion prompts

• Assessment questions

• Rubric

• Additional resources such as thinking routines, anchor charts, graphic organizers, videos, etc.

Making Inferences

Finding the Main Idea/Author’s Message

Synthesizing

Analyzing and Evaluating