Looking for some good stories for your students in grades 3 and higher to enjoy as get back into the swing of things this school year?  One great resource not to be overlooked is the tales center from Houghton Mifflin. You can find this outstanding collection of fun and interesting stories at http://www.eduplace.com/tales that is sure to delight your students. Spend some time browsing through the great collection of online stories on this site and I am sure you will find many great tales that will definitely get your student’s interest and attention.

In the next month, many of you will be returning to your classrooms to begin a new school year with an eager group of new faces waiting to see how things will go in your classroom. A wonderful gift that you can give your students of any age is to read aloud to them daily. For elementary students, this can be a picture book or a “classic” that would normally be just slightly beyond what your children might be able to read by themselves. For middle or high school, a daily read aloud might consist of a current news article, a magazine article, an internet article or even a biography or diary from the period you are studying.  Students love to listen to their teacher read. It is not only informative but also calming and relaxing and reminiscent of the times we spent on our mother’s knee listening to our favorite stories. When people are asked to reflect on what joyful experiences they had during their school years, being read to by the teacher is often on top of many people’s list.  For those children who did not have this wonderful, nurturing experience as children, helping children learn the joys of listening to good oral reading is even more important. If you have not used oral reading in your classroom, consider starting with even a poem or very short article. If you have, then keep reading aloud on a daily basis. You just may become the teacher that your students remember long after the ink on the graduation diploma has faded.

Ask students to create a story map to show the perspectives of each of the characters in a story they are reading. Place the Story title in the center of the map and then draw connected circles around the title with one circle representing each of the major characters. Ask students to list the character’s name at the top of the circle and to then write an entry about the story from the character’s viewpoint. Each entry should start with “I think” or “I feel” and should help clarify the perspectives or major concerns of the character. Once students have completed character perspective bubbles for all of the major characters, have students share their maps and their perspective bubbles to see how they compare. Students will enjoy the activity and will have greater insights into the characters in the story or novel they are reading.

Students love using cameras so why not capitalize on their natural interests by getting them to use visual images to create a story in 5 frames.  This task has two important parts. The first is thinking about the story line visually, creating a title that tells about the story in a very direct way and then creating and arranging the photos to tell the story.  The second part is sharing the photo story with a group. The group can comment on the poetic or prose forms of the images, critique the structure of the story, or make any other comments about the meaning or construction of the visual story.  Here is an example of a visual story using Flickr about a young colt’s first day in the world to give you some ideas.

If students are to comprehend what they read, they have to understand the meaning of the words used in the text. Teachers, therefore, should explicitly teach students the words they need to know if they are to truly grasp the content of a story. Take the word “dinghy,” for example. Students may need to be informed before they start reading that this word is a synonym for “boat.” The concept of “boat” would most likely be within the student’s background knowledge, so explaining the new term by sharing its synonym is a relatively easy way to assure student understanding. Without direct instruction in words such as these, students are unlikely to add them to their vocabularies especially if they do not live in an area where these words are commonly understood and used on a regular basis.

We should also teach important terms for content-area classes. There may be words that students do not have in their working vocabularies–such as photosynthesis or mitosis–that they would need to know in order to comprehend the subject matter being presented.

Other words that should be explicitly taught are those that have multiple meanings, such as “bank.” The student would need to understand that the term could refer to a financial institution, a curve in the road with a certain slope, or the side of a river, depending on context. While we do need to explicitly teach vocabulary to our words, one of the LEAST effective ways of doing this is to ask students to look up words in a dictionary or simply write down the definitions of various words. We know from research that students need to be exposed to a word on multiple occasions before they will be able to add this word to the lexicons in their heads. Help your students improve and expand their vocabularies by using games that add some excitement and fun to vocabulary learning.