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 [...]

Research shows that writing reinforces and builds reading skills so the more we get students writing, the more improvements they make in their reading. A great way to get students excited about writing is to get their works published on the internet. Reading Rockets and AdLit.org has recently established a monthly challenge that gives students [...]

If you are looking for ways to motivate children to improve their writing and thinking skills, consider having students produce digital stories. A digital story is a multi-media text consisting of pictures and video clips embedded in a document like a Power Point that is enhanced by a narrated soundtrack that tells the story. According [...]

Get students interested in monitoring their own reactions to text by asking them to rate each chapter of a book they are reading on an “interest level” chart.  After reading each chapter, students color in the bar to indicate how interested they were in the text of that chapter. Students can then discuss their reactions [...]

I recently watched two little second grade boys work on an assignment that asked them to read a couple of books by a specific author. They boys dutifully did this laughing at the funny parts and enjoying the images in the book. When they were finished reading, they were to talk about the book and [...]