Teacher resources and professional development across the curriculum

Teacher professional development and classroom resources across the curriculum

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Teaching Reading K-2 Workshop.

Comprehension and Response: Put It Into Practice

Put It Into Practice

Match Books to Strategies

In this activity, you will target specific comprehension strategies and identify books from your classroom library and school that best support teaching the strategy.

Selecting appropriate books for explicit and strategic instruction is an essential component of planning a successful comprehension strategy lesson. When making decisions for teaching comprehension you should match the book to the strategy:


Try this activity with other teachers in your study group or with teachers during grade-level meeting times.

  1. Target specific comprehension strategies you would like to teach your class.
  2. Identify books from your classroom library and around your school that would be effective in supporting each specific comprehension strategy.
  3. To add a level of higher understanding, identify a theme for each book. Encourage children to make connections between their own experiences and the events in the story, and relate them to the theme.
  4. Record this information on searchable index cards.

For example:




Frog and Toad

Organizing Information: story structure


Brave Irene

Elaborating on Ideas: character description

Reaching goals

Here are some suggestions of genres that are useful in teaching the following strategies:



Folk Tales

Story structure, summarization



General Fiction

Character change

Realistic Fiction

Making connections with child's own experiences


Sorting and categorizing

You may also choose to arrange these titles by reading format -- those books that are best used as read-alouds, shared reading, or guided reading groups.


Submit a list of books from your classroom library and the strategies and themes they support.

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