It's that time again, friends! Mrs. McClain from Buzzing with Mrs. McClain is hosting her monthly "You Oughta Know" blog hop! I am just so in love with this blog hop! A great group of bloggers will be sharing their tips, tricks, and resources that you "oughta know about!" Make sure you check out the other blogs in the blog hop at the end of this post to get more great tips and tricks!
ReadWorks is a website completely devoted to helping teachers teach the most difficult of skills: reading comprehension!
ReadWorks features many great tools that teachers can use, but in order to keep this post from becoming a novel, I'll share just a few of my favorite features!
My favorite tool that ReadWorks offers is their Skill & Strategy Units. Teaching a difficult skill like theme next week? No problem! Head on over to ReadWorks, select your grade, and ReadWorks has 3 ready-made lessons about theme for you! And as you can see below, ReadWorks has lessons for TONS of comprehension skills and strategies!
What I love about the lessons is that they are structured in an 'I do, we do, you do' format. Students get a lot from these lessons! They even include all the practice passages you need! If the lesson features a trade book, it is listed in the materials list!
Many of the lessons include direct teaching, guided practice, and independent practice passages for the skill being taught. This has been a lifesaver for me because I can use the guided practice pages during small groups! If I'm working with a lower group, I get the 2nd grade passages for the skill I'm teaching and if I'm working with a higher group, I use the 4th grade comprehension passages for the skill I'm teaching! Differentiation made easy!!
ReadWorks also features a database of passages that you can search through by Lexile level, comprehension skill/strategy being practiced, text type, and domain. You can find passages here to use for close reading, assessments, or just extra practice!
Also, most of the passages come with question sets that include multiple choice questions and constructed response questions. AWESOME, RIGHT?!
Did I mention that ReadWorks is a FREE resource?!?!?!?!? You heard me right! It is completely free! You do have to create an account but it is ABSOLUTELY worth it!! I sometimes think it's too good to be true, y'all!
ReadWorks saved me a lot of stress and planning time during my first year of teaching when I was still pretty clueless. I have been using ReadWorks all throughout this school year as well and I'm still obsessed with it! I'm teaching theme next week and ReadWorks is going to make it really easy to teach theme (a skill I dread teaching)! I cannot say enough good things about this site! It offers a ton of other great features as well like novel units, comprehension units, science and social studies passages (integration, anyone?!), and vocabulary passages. YOU HAVE TO CHECK IT OUT!!! Seriously.
Now that you've checked out my tip for the month, make sure you hop on over to the blogs below to check out their great tips and tricks as well!
Thanks for stopping by!
