Reading & Writing to Learn: Content Area Literacy Resources If every teacher is supposed to be a teacher of reading, how can we still address our content area standards? These resources and four simple strategies will not only build literacy skills, they will increase your students' comprehension of your content!
Making Connections and Activating Schema Students need to connect prior knowledge and experiences to new content to construct new knowledge. Making connections before, during, and after text can increase student understanding. Cloze Procedure A Cloze is a quick comprehension check for content area teachers. The text is at the student's independent reading level if they had 55% or more correct. The text is at the student's instructional reading level if they have between 38% and 55% correct. The text is at the student's frustration level if they had less than 38% correct.    Kidsclick This database has an approximate reading level for each site. Infoplease This is a great resource for finding text to complement your units. Digital Collections from the Library of Congress There's no place has a better collection of primary resources! Onekey Onekey is Google's search engine for kids.  Filamentality This is a free website for teachers. Why not check out some of the resources they've found?  Wikibooks Wikibooks is free library of online textbooks anyone can edit! And trust me, if there is incorrect information, someone will edit it!  Literature Learning Ladders This is a great resource for novel and genre studies!	Pulling Apart the Text These include before, during, and after reading strategies to increase students' comprehension of text. Adlit This is your one stop shop for a plethora of strategies, resources, and more! ABC Brainstorm This is a great strategy for pairs and small groups of students.  Inquiry Charts Inquiry charts are great for research and/or comparing multiple texts. Anticipation Guides This is a great pre-reading strategy to activate background knowledge and encourage reflection. Other Active Strategies: Pre-Reading Plan Get ideas for this great pre-reading strategy.  Graphic Organizers Scroll past the advertising and you get a ton of free graphic organizers.  Organization Strategies Try matching these strategies to text structure or a resource for note-taking.  Trash-n-Treasure Notes This is a great strategy for research and online text or for teaching struggling readers how to find answers to comprehension questions.  Power Thinking This is a great note-taking strategy for textbooks or online text.  Wordle and Tagcrowd These sites allow you to copy and paste text to visually arrange it. It's a great main idea and summarizing strategy!
Working with Words Whether you teach English, Math, Social Studies, Science, Art, Music or PE, all teachers have content area vocabulary to teach. These are some great resources for vocabulary activities. Active Strategies for Building Vocabulary These strategies from Just Read Now!  promote vocabulary development and understanding.  Word Maps Check out these graphic organizers from Reading Quest.  Visual Thesaurus This is an interactive dictionary and thesaurus that creates word maps. You can enter 3 words without subscribing. Visuwords An online graphical dictionary that includes associations. Word Spy This guide to new words will make a word lover out of you!  Merriam-Webster's Open Dictionary Open Dictionary includes words added by it's users.	Talking and Writing About Learning Having students talk and write about what they read will increase comprehension and encourage metacognition. 3-2-1 charts This can help students organize their thoughts as they read. It's a great alternative to typical, post-reading questions.    Scaffolding for Summarizing Summarizing is an important comprehension strategy.   RAFT RAFTs are fun and motivating content writing!   Discussion Strategies Encouraging meaningful dialogue increases comprehension!    Kagan's Online Magazine Check out Kagan's magazine for great cooperative learning techniques and resources.