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...
View ArticleAn 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...
View ArticlePicture 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...
View ArticleHow 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...
View ArticleUsing 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...
View ArticleCoaching 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......
View ArticleHelping 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,...
View ArticleHelping 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...
View ArticleHelp 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...
View ArticleMeaningful 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...
View ArticleWhy 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...
View ArticleUnderstanding 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,...
View Article
More Pages to Explore .....