Webinar: Help Kids Understand What They Read

I’m excited to share this free, 50-minute class on understanding and teaching reading comprehension. Originally recorded live for Learning Ally, the webinar was rerecorded so you can watch anytime.

In this dynamic, practical session, you’ll learn proven strategies to unlock children’s reading comprehension. Together, we’ll explore the best tools and strategies for helping children understand, remember, and enjoy what they read. You’ll learn:

• How to use YouTube to help kids understand and remember what they read.
• Why sticky notes are essential for students who forget text.
• What Calvin & Hobbes can teach us about motivation to read.

Selected Links

Part I – Overview of Reading Comprehension Processes

• Addressing word-reading problems with audio books.
• Structured Literacy Fact Sheet from the International Dyslexia Association.

Part II – Best Practices

• Books that Kids Actually Want to Read.
• Addressing common concerns about graphic novels.

Part III – Addressing Language Comprehension Problems

• Use Shmoop to quickly find book summaries and key vocabulary terms.
• How to Raise Voracious Readers. This is from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
• Free, online program for better family dinners.
• Why morphological instruction is so important for vocabulary, spelling, and reading.
• One of my favorite resources for teaching prefixes, bases, and suffixes.
• Current event articles written at 5 reading levels from NewsELA.
• REWARDS Writing provides explicit writing instruction for students to practice connecting sentences in different ways for different purposes.

Questions & Additional Resources

You can view the companion article on the reading comprehension resources and tools that I use every day with students.

During the live recording we ran over by 30 minutes, since there were dozens of questions. You’re invited to share your questions in the comments, so we can keep the conversation going.