Successful Strategies for Reading in the Content Area, Grades 3-5

To be successful, students must be able to comprehend the nonfiction material they encounter in textbooks, reference materials, and testing situations. The ability to interpret nonfiction information depends on the development of several key skills and strategies:

--Main Idea/Supporting Details
--Using Text Organizers
--Summarizing/Paraphrasing
--Using Parts of the Book
--Developing Vocabulary
--Making Inferences
--Prior Knowledge/Making Connections
--Setting the Purpose
--Author's Point of View
--Questioning
--Structural Patterns
--Visualizing

Each notebook in this series covers all of these skills and strategies by providing practical teaching guidelines as well as motivating student activities. This systematic approach to reading instruction, coupled with repeated exposure to a wide variety of nonfiction reading materials, provides a structure in which students can achieve significant growth.