supporting

reading

comprehension

Phonemic awareness

In many early elementary classrooms,

children clap the syllables in a word to
help them hear the individual
phonemes.
alphabetic principle
Picture from https://sightwords.com/phonemic-awareness/syllables/clapping-names/

At my daughters' school, students

learn letters and their corresponding
sounds using Houghton Mifflin's
Alphafriends. They sing a special
song for each friend. It is effective
because the music is catchy and
fun.
Picture from https://sweetforkindergarten.com/morning-routine-in-kindergarten/

vocabulary

My daughter's third grade

accuracy and fluency

teacher used hand motions As a parent volunteer, I would often listen to students
to teach landforms, such as read to determine their accuracy and fluency. One
plateau, mountain, and student in particular stood out because he could read
valley. The lesson was incredibly quickly, but without inflection or phrasing.
engaging and the hand He needed to be reminded to slow down and read it in
motions were memorable. a way that would be interesting to a listening
She can still tell me the audience.
different landforms, two Picture from https://talesfromthecla.medium.com/equitable-and-trauma-informed-math-teaching-aa37e442ddcc

years later.
comprehension
Picture is of my daughter

When I was a guest teacher in a fourth

grade classroom, the students used
multiple thinking maps to organize
information gained from texts in many
subjects. The students also wrote a
So why? or So what? statement to
help them draw conclusions from their
VOCABULARY maps.
Picture from https://thinkingmaps.weebly.com/types-of-maps.html

One time as a guest teacher, the

classroom teacher had me preview
the text's vocabulary by giving each Comprehension

group of students a vocabulary word.

When reading with a kindergarten class, the
They had to work together to read the
teacher asked me to periodically stop and
definition, then use that word in a
ask the class questions about what we had
sentence, which they shared with the
just read and predictions of what was to
class.
Picture from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n91ene3iNLE
come. These questions modeled the types
of questions that fluent readers ask
themselves while reading a text.
Picture from Canva