Comprehension
TITLE: Reading Workshop
ADDRESS: http://www.manatee.k12.fl.us/sites/elementary/palmasola/rcompindex.htm
SUMMARY: You can explore many different comprehension skills at varying levels. Some examples: Phonics, Word Study Skills, Vocabulary, Reading Comprehension. There are online examples, practice sheets, tutorials and many different printable materials.
RATIONALE: Because of all the reading comprehension strategies available, practice sheets, and Dolch Word Flashcards that are printable, I think this site would be a tremendous help to future educators and also to accomplished teachers.
TITLE: Reading Comprehension
ADDRESS: http://www.hio.ft.hanze.nl/thar/reading.htm
SUMMARY: Another wonderful website concentrated on Reading comprehension. I love the quotes! “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body”….Joseph Addison. Some of the subjects covered are: Skimming and scanning, Non-verbal signals, Structure of texts, Structure of paragraphs, Punctuation, Author’s viewpoint (inference), Reader anticipation, and Summarizing.
RATIONALE: This website gives very straight forward lessons in comprehension and it very detailed and lengthy. It follows up with an example for every strategy.
TITLE: Ed Strachar’s Reading Genius
ADDRESS: http//:www.readinggenius.com/speed_reading_library/lib4_10.php
SUMMARY: This website is excellent for any student that is struggling with reading comprehension or for any teacher that has students who struggle with comprehending something they just read. There are great tips for everybody, like the four key steps for readers to follow so they will understand the context of whatever they are reading. The four key steps are focusing on what you’re reading by being free of distractions, picking something you are interested in, getting yourself in the right mood before you read, and finally you have to be able to recall what you just read. “Anyone who can do these steps effectively will read better.”
RATIONALE: This website is informative because the steps to comprehending by reading better are very simple to follow. It is encouraging to anyone visiting because it reiterates that reading comprehension is possible. The entire website is great, but in terms of activities for comprehension, it is educational and just all around fantastic for any teacher or student.
TITLE: How to Improve Reading Comprehension
ADDRESS: http://www.marin.cc.ca.us/~don/Study/7read.html.
SUMMARY: This website addresses very important tips on how to improve comprehension. “The purpose of reading is to connect the ideas on the page to what you already know.” Reading comprehension requires motivation and this website has some great tips for students to implement into the classroom and into their work at home. Motivation is the main idea on this page. Students must broaden their background knowledge by reading the newspaper, a magazine, or a book. Reading comprehension is achieved when students can take the words that are written on the paper and make thoughts out of them.
RATIONALE: This website gets straight to the point on how to improve reading comprehension. Students are encouraged to read about something they are interested in and build their mental framework. The simple tips on this web page are easy for students to remember and then apply them to anything they are reading. Teachers are also given important tips about motivation because this is an important action for students to apply. I would recommend this website to any teacher because it is easy to navigate and the given information is vital to any student’s achievement in comprehension.
TITLE: Strategies for Reading Comprehension
ADDRESS: http://curry.edschool.virginia.edu/go/readquest/strat/
SUMMARY: This website is filled with numerous ideas that include well developed instructions for teachers to utilize in their classroom. Under the sub-heading you will find excellent examples that relate to the instructions.
RATIONALE: This website contains twenty-seven ideas that are designed to help students to develop their comprehension skills. Although the main focus is on social studies, it can easily be used in the other subject areas. I would definitely recommend this site to all teachers.
TITLE: Reading Comprehension
ADDRESS: http://www.coedu.ust.edu/~morris/redcomp.html
SUMMARY: This website includes thirteen instructional sub-topics that give clear direction on how to implement them. They are designed to help students comprehend what they have read.
RATIONALE: Reading is an essential requirement for students to be successful in school; therefore, it is important that they learn to understand what they have read. This is web site gives valuable strategies that can help students increase their comprehension through cooperative learning.
TITLE: Wisconsin Literacy Education and Reading Network Source
ADDRESS: http://www.wilearns.com/
SUMMARY: Complete literacy resource to support teachers and families in teaching process of reading and comprehension. Reading develops over time and involves learning the language, understanding the relationship of letters and sounds, and using background knowledge to bring meaning to the printed word. Comprehension of print is the goal of reading.
RATIONALE: This website has identified six essential reading strategies for developing comprehension skills and abilities. Making Connections, Questioning, Visualizing, Inferring, Determining Importance, and Synthesizing are some of the strategies that are talked about in the website. Each of these strategies is integral to comprehension, and together thy represent the active mindset children must assure in order to become learners as well as readers.
TITLE: Starfall
ADDRESS: http://www.starfall.com/
SUMMARY: Starfall is a creative website designed to teach children to read. The Starfall learn-to-read program was created to meet the needs of the emergent reader by incorporating rhyming games and high-interest books that teach phonemic awareness.
RATIONALE: The Starfall Method promises to improve reading acquisition by using the Internet to help make it fun for the children and easy for the educators. It was created by The Polis-Schutz family, Dr. Steven Schutz had trouble when he was young and his wife, the renowned poet Susan Polis Schutz was a teacher in New Jersey and New York City in the 1960s. Together they formed this site with their children, to help other children.
TITLE: Generative Teaching of Comprehension
ADDRESS: http://www.readingcenter.buffalo.edu/center/research/gencom.html
SUMMARY: This website gives four steps to generate students’ comprehension skills. These four things include preconceptions/knowledge/student perceptions, motivation, attention, and generation. It also gives benefits and instructional guidelines on how generative teaching of comprehension looks like. At the end of the site, there is a table that gives practice ways of generating this concept. It tells what the teachers gives the students and what the students generate from comprehension.
RATIONALE: This site gives straight forward ideas and how to teach them in the classroom. The chart tells a teacher what to teach and what the certain outcome will be from the student.
TITLE: Reading Comprehension
ADDRESS: http://www.rhlschool.com/reading.htm
SUMMARY: This site features free reading comprehension worksheets for teachers and parents to copy for their kids. These sheets include original stories, poems, essays, and articles. They are most appropriate for upper elementary though middle school years. This site has links to the worksheets on the homepage. It also has free educational software to download.
RATIONALE: This website gives worksheets on many different reading comprehension levels. I think that it is great the teachers can print FREE copies of the worksheet to use in the classroom. Each worksheet is set up in different ways and on different topics.
TITLE: Reading Comprehension Stories and Worksheets
ADDRESS: http://www.edhelper.com/ReadingComprehension.htm
SUMMARY: In the reading comprehension section of the edhelper.com website, there are a lot of worksheets and stories that can be printed off and used in the classroom. This site categorizes the worksheets by grade levels. It also combines all subject, math science, reading, spelling, writing, and vocabulary, into the worksheets. You just click on the sheet you want to download and print it out. On the edhelper homepage, there are also lesson plans and resources for every subject. There are over 5000 worksheets on this site.
RATIONALE: This website gives activities that can help improve comprehension. A teacher has a choice of the subject that she can use to help reading comprehension. Also, there are different topics to choose from. The site is great because you can download FREE worksheets. Anything free for teachers is a major plus.
TITLE: Big Ideas in Beginning Reading
ADDRESS: http://reading.uoregon.edu/big_ideas/comp.php
SUMMARY: This site has it all. It explains what comprehension is, how to teach it, what it looks like in the classroom, why it is important, and programs and materials and more. All you have to do is click on the topic that you want to read about and it takes you to another web page. It also gives ideas and assessments that can be used in the classroom. There is a lot of information on this website.
RATIONALE: This site gives explanation on just about everything on reading comprehension. It is very easy to use. It gives you all the topics with hyperlinks so that all you have to do is click on the topic you want to know more about.
TITLE: The Resource room
ADDRESS: http://www.resourceroom.net/Comprehension/index.asp
SUMMARY: This site has many different topics. It has reading, spelling and comprehension ideas to help the child learn so they can understand what they are reading.
RATIONALE: If the child understands the words they are reading, they will comprehend the meaning of the reading.
TITLE: A Dictionary of Comprehension
ADDRESS: http://www.dictionarydictionary.com
SUMMARY: This site will help the students find out what part of grammar a word is. It will also translate it into many different languages.
RATIONALE: This site will help the teacher with non-English speaking students. This site can be used in the classroom so the students can find out the part of grammar a word is.