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Channel: Tracy Ostwald Kowald – Connections Academy
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Accommodating Special Needs with Online Education Technology

I had an interesting phone call from a Learning Coach recently. The parent asked if he could modify a journal-writing prompt. His student was struggling to write from the perspective of a disabled...

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An Introduction to Using Effective Reading Comprehension Strategies

How do you know if your student really understands what he or she reads? Parents often resort to a strategy, such as sounding it out or decoding the letters that make the words, but... The post An...

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Picture This: How Visualizing Stories Supports Reading Comprehension

“The fog comes in on little cat feet.” Carl Sandburg wrote this vivid image more than a century ago. Every time I see fog, I picture the fog to be like an old and... The post Picture This: How...

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How Prior Knowledge Helps Kids Understand What They Read

In my sixth grade class, we were reading a scene from a novel in which the character was waiting impatiently for her sister. Immediately one of my students waved her hand energetically to get... The...

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Using Reading Comprehension Questions to Read Between the Lines

Absorbing and interacting with reading material often brings questions—and questioning is a skill that comes naturally to most children. While some questions can be challenging to answer, it’s...

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Coaching Children to Use Inferences and Draw Conclusions While Reading

Recently during a test, a puzzled student carried his test booklet over to where his teacher sat, pointed to a word he didn’t know, and asked her, “Inference—what does that mean?” Unable to assist......

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Helping Students Find the Most Important Information in a Text

Every January my alma mater, a small liberal arts college, holds the Great Midwest Trivia Contest—a contest for answering questions that are extremely trivial, or unimportant. If it’s common knowledge,...

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Helping Kids Synthesize Information for Reading Comprehension

Imagine a high school senior busily putting the final touches on an English project—creating liner notes to a sound track CD for Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Students use what they know about the play to...

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Help Your Kids Learn to Self-Check Reading Comprehension

Socrates is quoted as saying, “True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.” One of my college friends had a poster on her wall that read, “Part of being smart is knowing what... The post...

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Meaningful Connections Increases Reading Comprehension

I was reading a book about a family who had a large yellow parrot that could mimic any sound or voice. This made me recall my job during college. I was working in a... The post Meaningful Connections...

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Why I’m Thankful for Teaching in a Virtual School

My name is Tracy Ostwald-Kowald (my students call me Mrs. O.K.), and I am an online school teacher for Connections Academy. My students live all over the state of Wisconsin. There’s a map in... The...

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Understanding Multiple Intelligences and Learning Styles

Educators and researchers are always looking for innovative ways to improve student performance. As a result, the education field is crowded with different theories about learning, teaching, studying,...

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