Reading Beyond the Words: Active Reading Strategies for Student Understanding

Listen to the full episode to hear five active reading strategies:

Do you ever see students reading in your classroom that have great fluency and can recall the words on the page, but can’t give any details about what happened in the text? If this describes students in your classroom, it’s time to implement active reading strategies. This comprehension strategy is used to evaluate a student’s understanding of a text. In this episode, I’m sharing five active reading strategies that you can implement in your classrooms today.

Each active reading strategy asks students to interact with a text on a deeper level. They require students to make predictions, identify key concepts, draw conclusions, look at what they notice about the text, reflect, and more. You will notice that each strategy builds on top of or compliments one another. By working together, they help students reinforce their understanding and make it easier for them to recall that information at a later time.

Our goal as literacy teachers is to improve a student’s comprehension, which these active reading strategies do. When you implement these in your classroom, you’re helping students take a step forward with text retention and improvement in understanding the material. By starting with these five active reading strategies, you can then explore other engagement strategies to improve student comprehension.

In this episode on active reading strategies, I share:

• A basic definition of active reading and how it improves student comprehension
• 5 active reading strategies you can implement in your classrooms today
• How each strategy builds and connects to each other
• Why reviewing and reinforcing these different strategies allows for improved reading comprehension

Resources Mentioned:

• Join The Daily Writing Disguise
• Vocabulary Writing Prompts FREE Sample
• Vocabulary Writing Prompts
• Writing Prompts Free Sample
• Small Group Reading Skills Activity Sets
• Reading Reference Helpers
• Reading Skills Anchor Charts

Connect with Megan:

• Join The Daily Writing Disguise Membership here
• Shop my TpT store here
• Check out TDWD Collections here
• Receive emails from me here
• Follow me on Instagram here
• Read my blog posts here

About The Literacy Dive Podcast:

Do you find yourself seeking new implementations when it comes to literacy instruction? Do you crave fresh ideas and engaging lessons to transform your students into skilled readers and writers? The Literacy Dive Podcast was created to provide educators, like you, with actionable steps and strategies to improve teaching reading and writing. 

Your host, Megan Polk, is the creator and owner of The Literacy Dive, a company that creates educational, literacy curriculum that aims to close the gap and support children in reaching mastery. Being a literacy specialist and having over a decade of teaching grades K-5, Megan knows the power of collaboration and working alongside teachers and parents to provide them with the support, confidence, and resources they need to meet students where they are.

Dive in each Monday as Megan and her guests unpack an element of literacy or various topics relatable to educators. Here are some topics covered in this literacy podcast: writing strategies, reading comprehension, the writing process, the science of reading, and small group instruction.

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