Watching a student master reading and phonics strategies has always been one of my favorite moments as a teacher. The excitement builds with each word my student reads.  It is a proud moment for both of us; a shared accomplishment that makes everything worthwhile. 

Read Across America is an event that celebrates and inspires a love of reading.  This weeklong event can include wacky spirit days, book fairs, and activities that motivate students to read.  As we come to the end of this fun week, I’d like to share some strategies that I found helpful to engage my students in reading on a deeper level. 

Often, my students would read a text once but not fully understand what they were reading.  They would skip over unknown vocabulary words, and although they were able to answer surface-level questions about a text, getting students to fully understand the meaning of a text was difficult.  One of the ways I used to get my students to think critically about reading was by using close reading strategies. Close reading strategies help to teach students to analyze a text, which promotes deeper understanding and meaning.  These strategies encourage students to read a text multiple times, often through different lenses, to look for details, main ideas, text structures, and so much more.

Close reading strategies can be modeled on a variety of texts, allowing for diversity of reading materials for your students.  When I first started using close reading strategies, I was able to use my document camera to model close reading, but that had a limiting capacity to encourage collaboration and provide additional context about the passage to my students.  Interactive solutions provide opportunities not only for me as a teacher to model close reading strategies, but also for students to practice close reading strategies with each other, engage in the context of the passage, and offer tools for vocabulary support. 

Read below to learn ways I use close reading strategies with an interactive solution to get my students engaged in their reading: 

• Display your text on your interactive solution.  This can be done by sharing your screen from your device to your interactive solution or by accessing the document from your connected cloud drive.  

• Set your purpose for reading.  I review the essential question and objective with my students prior to starting to read.  This sets a goal in my students’ minds as we read.

• While reading, I use the digital annotation tool to have my students virtually mark-up the text as we read together.

• For each of the three reads I conduct with my students, I change the color of the digital annotation pen so my students can see what details we discovered when we re-read the passage.  By changing the color of the digital annotation pen each time we read, students see a visual representation of the additional information and the colors provide a visual representation to my students of why re-reading is important.

• I like to save the image of my digital annotation and insert the image into the digital whiteboard.  My digital whiteboard provides opportunities for students to collaborate by using built-in tools such as sticky notes, mind maps, and more.  This takes our digital annotations to the next level!

• When my students come across unfamiliar words in a text, I use the interactive solution’s built-in browser to look up the vocabulary word.  This practice models strategies so students don’t skip words they are unfamiliar with when reading independently.  

• To help my students understand the context of what we are reading, I can use the interactive solution’s browser to look for videos, images, and other resources that can help my students understand how these factors may have influenced the text.  Visuals provide many students with necessary supports to gain understanding of a text. 

Check out the video above to see these strategies in action.

Putting all of these pieces together helps students think about their reading at a deeper level.  Interactive solutions offer my students more vocabulary support and contextual understanding when reading a text. I hope close reading strategies can provide your students with a more engaging experience while reading. 

Looking for a text to practice close reading strategies? The National Education Association (NEA) provides a list of diverse books that can help students see different perspectives and voices as they read.  Check out these recommendations from NEA for Read Across America Week. 

Erica Starr is an Educational Technology Consultant at Advanced Classroom Technologies.  Erica works with districts and schools to formulate professional development plans around technology integration and provides professional development training for teachers and administrators.  Erica is a Nationally Board Certified Teacher with endorsements in special education and middle school mathematics.

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