Reading isn't enough. We want our students to truly understand the material, right? Today's guest, Tina, is sharing some fantastic strategies that work well with middle school students.

Connect with today's guest

Website - www.teachwithtina.com

TPT Store - https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/store/tina-kolley-teach-with-tina

Facebook - Teach-With-Tina - https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100089466229377

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/teach.with.tina/

Resources Mentioned

Reading Strategies Landing Page - https://teachwithtina.myflodesk.com/xgepdto9v7

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[00:00:28] Ellie: Hello.

[00:00:42] Tina: Hi, Ellie and Brittany, thank you so much for having me.

[00:00:55] Tina: So my name is Tina Cauley and I am the Tina Behind Teach With Tina. I actually took the scenic route to teaching but I truly believe that every step I took led me to where I am meant to be. So I had wanted to be a teacher ever since I was a kid. But when I started college, I actually fell in love with psychology. So I ended up earning both my BA and my Master's in psychology. And after graduation, I jumped at an opportunity to move to Australia for a few

[00:01:24] Such a learning experience. And to support myself through all that I turned to accounting, which was a skill that actually helped me get through college.

[00:01:38] Ellie: Okay.

[00:01:56] Ellie: Nice.

[00:01:59] Ellie: wow.

[00:02:31] Ellie: Not naming any names.

[00:03:02] dreamt of. So it got me hooked, and a few years later, my district offered a retirement buyout.

[00:03:30] and parents. Yeah. So I've been really, really lucky. It's just such an amazing journey and I am so grateful that I get to keep doing what I love and learn a little bit.

[00:03:41] Brittany: That sounds incredible.

[00:03:44] Brittany: Wow. Um, at what point did you come back to America?

[00:04:03] which was where I was from at the time. I.

[00:04:27] Tina: So like activation, especially in reading, but really in any subject, it's like a mental warmup before reading. It's just a quick and intentional exercise that I use to prepare my students for what they're about to read. I like to activate their prior knowledge. I like to set a purpose. I like to be able to help students come to the table with just a small little foothold into what the story or the text might be about.

[00:05:06] walk is what we do. We explore questions like, you know, what, what is this story gonna be about?

[00:05:30] Ellie: Oh, okay.

[00:05:47] Are you worried about this? Are you worried you're gonna have to write an essay afterwards? I like to gauge my students' comfort level, their confidence, and I want them to understand that there's always a purpose behind everything we read,

[00:06:07] Ellie: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. You do need that buy-in. They need to know that there's some kind of purpose, and these are all wonderful questions to get students ready to read and get them thinking rather than just saying, okay, let's go to page one.

[00:06:22] Ellie: And so we could use activation and some of the other strategies we're gonna talk about with nonfiction reading as well.

[00:06:29] Tina: Absolutely. I always feel like good reading strategies, like good teaching can be used with every subject and every

[00:06:45] diverse, and with non-fiction texts, especially subjects like science, social studies, they can be pretty abstract, especially for upper elementary and middle school students. Fifth grade science our students are introduced to complex, concepts like property of matter, atoms, molecules. They can't see those things. They're not easy to visualize, they are hard to connect to. So I always begin with that text walkthrough. Preview the headings, looking at the illustrations, look at the diagrams, explain the diagrams, activate any knowledge they may have about

[00:07:30] I just find it's about giving the students the tools they need to understand and really engage with the text right from the start.

[00:07:47] Tina: You know, most of the reading strategies I use and that, I think are important are really ones that teachers are familiar

[00:08:20] So have them practice summarizing, complete a graphic organizer, turn all those ideas into a well-written paragraph. When we explore theme I try to make them support their thinking with text evidence.

[00:08:51] Ellie: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:09:13] Tina: Exactly. Exactly.

[00:09:36] But to be able to point at that and say, well, this is right here why I think this, this is why, this is my support.

[00:10:03] Tina: So complete honesty vocabulary I think is a huge challenge. If I have the kids look up the definitions in the dictionary,

[00:10:14] Especially when the dictionary explanations seem to, you know, use unfamiliar words. So I do a lot of sketching, visuals, . graphic organizers, things like that, especially with the front loading.

[00:10:45] Tina: Yes. Yes.

[00:10:59] Good teaching strategies work for everybody. And really the favorite is visuals. , Showing pictures. I like to have the students sketch,

[00:11:21] Ellie: Mm-hmm. A good like memory trigger.

[00:11:25] trying to make, the complex and the abstract words, especially more concrete. I also model a lot of thinking aloud when I read. Often with especially a fifth grade, sixth grade novel, I will read part of it to them because sometimes they are so challenging and I always pause, come across challenging vocabulary and figurative language.

[00:12:09] Brittany: That's fabulous and so helpful. Thank you very much.

[00:12:38] So that was very helpful for students, especially once it became an established habit. Just like model that

[00:12:44] what a great habit to take on to high school.

[00:12:56] It reinforced the fact that they needed to get it done and then it became a great habit for them.

[00:13:01] Tina: great.

[00:13:13] Tina: So if you've ever finished reading a page and thought, I have no idea what I just read,

[00:13:20] comprehension. So monitoring is the act of really just being mentally present as you read, constantly checking in with yourself to see if the text is making sense to you. It's not an easy skill, but it's really important, for true understanding. Clarifying kind of goes hand in hand with that. It's what happens when you realize something isn't making sense and you stop to slow down, reread it, rethink it, maybe put that post-it note in and ask a question. I often ask my students, do you really understand what the paragraph was saying?

[00:13:58] Especially, I find the fifth graders, the upper elementary, middle school, it, you know. I'm all that. So yes, I'll explain it to you. But that's the level of comprehension and even mastery that I'm aiming for. I try to reinforce with my students, especially. At that level, it's not how fast you read because they all wanna race through everything. It's about what you learned. How did you feel? What did you take away from that reading? So monitoring and clarifying, I believe, are lifelong skills. They're more important than ever now because we are bombarded with information, bombarded with distractions. And I think as teachers, my job is to help students not just learn the facts, but learn how to learn, learn how to discern information. And I think these two strategies are a huge part of that.

[00:14:53] Brittany: Totally many times reading those college textbooks on ancient Rome or geographic geology, I'd find myself rereading a paragraph multiple times because I just wasn't monitoring my comprehension. My mind was elsewhere. As the text gets harder, the monitoring does too. So, Tina, towards the end of your strategies list, you mentioned one pagers, and I've been intrigued by those lately.

[00:15:32] Tina: So I fell in love with one pagers in my fifth grade classroom. Where I taught, we had 35 to 36

[00:16:12] we're studying, nonfiction text skills, historical events. I use them a lot in social studies.

[00:16:40] They can be completed individually. I've done them with groups. And really I can adapt 'em to just about anything, any subject. Most often I use 'em in language arts and social studies, but I've used 'em as exit tickets, math notes, alternatives to book reports, reviews, informal assessments, just to kind of get a gauge of where my students are. Because they're so open-ended, they're so easy to differentiate.

[00:17:22] can absolutely go off the rails showing me what they

[00:17:34] I think they're engaging.

[00:17:44] Ellie: Yeah, that sounds fantastic. It looks like you have a ready to use example of a one pager in your free reading comprehension strategies toolkit. Can you tell us a little bit about this fantastic resource in case our listeners would like to grab it?

[00:18:23] To meet the different classroom styles

[00:18:47] So if somebody wanted to take a piece of construction paper or even a poster. And create an infographic they can use that as a culminating activity to a novel, a unit, uh, anything. And then I have all the reading strategies redone as posters that you can hang up or give to students to put in their notebooks to remind them of all the different ways they need to engage with the text.

[00:19:24] Ellie: Awesome. That is fantastic. Thanks for making that available. If you're excited to try out some of Tina's strategies in your own classroom, check out the show notes to grab the reading comprehension strategies toolkit and join her email community.

[00:20:00] Tina: Well, most of the time I have a, I'm, uh, hanging out on my blog at teachwithtina.com, or I'm on Instagram, which is teach dot with dot Tina.

[00:20:27] Brittany: Thanks again for joining us, Tina, and thanks to all of you for tuning in. Until next time, keep building your teaching toolbox.