Newsela 19 Fun Reading Comprehension Strategies To Teach

See how Newsela’s products help you build a solid educational foundation so you can engage, support, and grow every learner. Newsela launched in 2013 with a bold mission: Meaningful classroom learning for every student. Today, our team constantly strives to deliver powerful solutions that inspire our users. Newsela products are purpose-built to unlock student motivation, inspire teachers, and drive long-lasting learning outcomes. Everything you need to be successfully while using the Newsela suite of products. See how Newsela’s products help you build a solid educational foundation so you can engage, support, and grow every learner.

Are you looking for engaging reading activities to use with your students? Do your students struggle with actively thinking about the text as they read? These engaging Newsela reading activities using the See, Think, Wonder strategy are guaranteed to be effective with your intermediate elementary students. Newsela is definitely my #1 go-to resource to find engaging nonfiction content for students! This FREE website offers high-interest articles about current topics. But the best part is that you can differentiate the content for your students.

It offers the same article at multiple Lexile levels, which means all students can access the same content at their individual reading levels (starting at 2nd-grade level). This is extremely beneficial for students who are below grade level as it can be hard to find engaging content at the lower reading levels. Not only that, nonfiction reading is a skill that needs to be developed with students but it can be challenging to find high-interest articles – thankfully Newsela has a wealth of them available! The articles all include comprehension questions that you can use with students. There is a paid version of Newsela which allows teachers to assign articles and comprehension questions; however, there’s so much you can do with the free version. Keep reading to learn about the engaging Newsela reading activities you can implement with your students.

To introduce the text, I use an image or Youtube video to build students’ background knowledge. Since the content on Newsela focuses on pop culture trends and other viral content, it is easy to find pictures and videos to supplement the articles. These obviously increase motivation, build background knowledge, and improve engagement. This along with the fact that the text is high-interest for students makes Newsela’s articles perfect to use with the See, Think, Wonder strategy. Students begin by discussing or recording their thinking about the image or video using the See, Think, Wonder structure. They will naturally begin to make predictions, inferences, and connections to help them better understand the content.

By taking the time to build background knowledge first, students will be better equipped to comprehend the Newsela article. Comprehension is the goal of reading. If students don’t understand what they read, well, reading is a meaningless activity. The good news: Reading comprehension can be taught, practiced, and mastered. As students become readers, you can teach strategies that students can learn and add to their toolbox. Think about reading comprehension as a combination of skills.

Students need to get the words off the page (fluency, word reading) and understand the language they are reading (language structure, knowledge, vocabulary, and reasoning). If a student does not have strong language comprehension skills in particular, they won’t understand what they read, even if their fluency and word reading is strong. Reading comprehension strategies focus on building students’ language comprehension and teach them how to tackle text when they don’t understand. Scarborough’s Reading Rope is a way to visualize the skills that go into reading. The top five skills (background knowledge, vocabulary, language structure, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge) become more strategic over time as students learn how to apply strategies to different kinds of text. The bottom three skills (phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition) become more automatic as students master each skill.

Learn more: What Is Reading Comprehension? Here are our favorite reading comprehension strategies to help students develop and strengthen their reading comprehension. We partnered with Newsela to develop 100 interdisciplinary literacy strategies for elementary and secondary teachers that support students to read, analyze, and comprehend complex informational texts. The Newsela Master Teacher project shares the practices of nine Newsela-Certified educators and showcases how they leverage Newsela tools to personalize literacy instruction for their students. Each teacher will bring you into their classroom, sharing videos and artifacts that bring the instructional strategies to life. Each student becomes an expert on an article and then teaches the group so that the group can draw connections based on what they have learned.

Students read about others who have brought about change and then design their own projects to impact their homes, schools, or communities. Complement novel studies by building students’ background knowledge on a topic using Newsela articles. Comprehension strategies are conscious plans — sets of steps that good readers use to make sense of text. Comprehension strategy instruction helps students become purposeful, active readers who are in control of their own reading comprehension. These seven strategies have research-based evidence for improving text comprehension. Students who are good at monitoring their comprehension know when they understand what they read and when they do not.

They have strategies to “fix” problems in their understanding as the problems arise. Research shows that instruction, even in the early grades, can help students become better at monitoring their comprehension. Comprehension monitoring instruction teaches students to: Metacognition can be defined as “thinking about thinking.” Good readers use metacognitive strategies to think about and have control over their reading. Before reading, they might clarify their purpose for reading and preview the text. During reading, they might monitor their understanding, adjusting their reading speed to fit the difficulty of the text and “fixing” any comprehension problems they have.

After reading, they check their understanding of what they read. Students may use several comprehension monitoring strategies: Reading comprehension strategies are all the rage right now, and I get why. Overall, students are simply not progressing like they should be considering we spend an average of $15,000/per student each year on schooling (U.S. Census Bureau). Unfortunately, that money is rarely spent on actual resources that include reading comprehension strategies for the classroom.

When I first started teaching, I had zero reading curriculum and only about 15-20 literature textbooks in classes of over 30 students. Many students had to share, and NONE could take home any books. On top of that, so many gurus over my 17 years of teaching came into the schools touting some sort of miracle program to bring up ALL students’ reading levels. After so many years, I have yet to see a reading comprehension strategies curriculum solve ANY problems for my students. BUT I have seen my students make more progress than the average classroom during my years in public education, and I have also had the privilege of teaching my own daughter how to read! I hope what I offer can help you make gains and growth for all of your students as well!

Reading comprehension is a crucial skill in any classroom, but especially when teaching English. For many students, reading comprehension is not just about decoding words but understanding the underlying message, context, and themes of the text. In this blog post, we will explore effective strategies for implementing reading comprehension lessons in the classroom. We’ll focus on key stages: pre-reading, while-reading, and post-reading. These stages, when executed correctly, help students engage deeply with the material, develop critical thinking skills, and build independent reading habits that extend beyond the classroom. Reading comprehension isn’t just about understanding the words on a page; it’s about engaging with a text on multiple levels.

It requires students to interact with the material, understand its structure, draw inferences, and reflect on its meaning. For many learners, especially in Indian classrooms, reading comprehension can be challenging because of language barriers, unfamiliar vocabulary, or complex sentence structures. By using effective reading strategies, teachers can help students develop a solid foundation in understanding texts and improve their ability to analyze and interpret what they read. Effective reading comprehension lessons are also vital because they foster independent learning. In a world that increasingly demands the ability to process large amounts of written information quickly and accurately, these skills are fundamental to a student’s academic and professional success. Before diving into a text, it’s essential to prepare students for what they are about to read.

The pre-reading phase is crucial because it activates prior knowledge and sets expectations for the reading experience. Here are some pre-reading strategies to incorporate into your classroom: Before students start reading, it’s helpful to activate their existing knowledge about the topic. This could involve asking them what they already know about the subject or brainstorming key concepts related to the text. Activating prior knowledge helps students build connections between the new text and what they already know, making the reading experience more meaningful. See how Newsela’s products help you build a solid educational foundation so you can engage, support, and grow every learner.

Newsela launched in 2013 with a bold mission: Meaningful classroom learning for every student. Today, our team constantly strives to deliver powerful solutions that inspire our users. Newsela products are purpose-built to unlock student motivation, inspire teachers, and drive long-lasting learning outcomes. Everything you need to be successfully while using the Newsela suite of products. See how Newsela’s products help you build a solid educational foundation so you can engage, support, and grow every learner. A post from our Literacy Learning: Science of reading blog series written by teachers, for teachers, this series provides educators with the knowledge and best practices needed to sharpen their skills and bring effective...

Reading comprehension is considered the ultimate goal of reading instruction. While in the past, there was a belief that reading comprehension was based only on extracting meaning from the text, we now know that comprehension involves a reader using conscious processes to construct meaning... In her influential research study titled, “What Classroom Observations Reveal About Reading Comprehension Instruction (1978),” educator and researcher Dolores Durkin described reading comprehension as “the essence of reading.” It truly is the reason we... One thing to note is that although we often refer to these instructional methods as reading comprehension strategies: reading comprehension is the result of many different simultaneous processes. In 95 Comprehension Grades 3-6, we use the word processes instead of strategies to emphasize that these things are happening while readers are reading. Strategies are considering ongoing processes, and the goal is for teachers to guide students to be aware of and use these processes so that they will eventually be able to discern between them, and...

Dr. Diana Betts, early literacy expert and regional consultant manager with 95 Percent Group, underscores why this is the correct language to use when discussing reading comprehension. Building a proper baseline knowledge for reading comprehension and writing impacts all parts of learning. Through quality resources and strategies, you can create reading and writing lessons that fit your students’ needs. Explore how to teach developmentally appropriate and engaging English and language arts skills such as phonics, fluency, reading comprehension, decoding, and more. Teaching reading comprehension strategies and writing skills through technology calls for innovation and creativity; luckily, thinking on one’s feet and problem-solving come naturally to teachers.

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