This guide was produced by the Center on Instruction for technical assistance providers and others who work with state education leaders to improve reading achievement among elementary school students. It describes a suite of "Student Center Activities" (SCAs) designed to offer K-5 classroom teachers a wide range of activities that can…

Examines the benefits of allowing children ample and regular time periods to read on their own and in their own area of interest in relation to the need for children to understand reading as more than a series of unrelated workbook exercises. (HTH)

Presents four question-asking strategies that can help improve students' reading comprehension: ReQuest, Radio Reading, Directed Reading-Thinking Activity, and Question-Answer-Relationships. Also discusses taxonomies useful for classifying questions. (ARH)

Offers Request, the Directed Reading-Thinking Activity, the Expectation Outline, the Prereading Guided Reading Procedure, Word Wonder, and Semantic Webbing as techniques that use many of the basic principles of the directed reading activity while adjusting to the needs of specific materials and students. (FL)

Notes the plethora of guides to trade books for classroom use. Suggests what a good guide should do, and presents a guide to help teachers write and edit their own. (MS)

Offers suggestions for effective use of the Directed Reading-Thinking Activity developed by R. Stauffer. (FL)

Research indicates that prior knowledge is an exceptionally important determiner of reading comprehension. Many of the prereading strategies currently used to assist reading comprehension do not help teachers identify what students already know about a topic. In an effort to integrate instructional assessment with prereading instruction, the…

Proposes the "say and write" method and the directed sentence reading method as ways of using language experience stories to develop children's sight vocabulary. (FL)

Discusses instructional approaches to content area reading that are described in ERIC documents. Among the areas discussed are prereading activities; strategies to support comprehension as students read; an integrated approach to vocabulary, comprehension, and textbook organization; and kits of materials for integrating reading skills into content…

Suggests that critical reading and reading comprehension be taught separately at first to insure that students learn both to understand and to evaluate pieces of writing. (MKM)

The traditional approach to reading in the content areas has been to teach reading skills only in reading class, usually using literature or narrative selections and expecting transfer of those skills to content texts or other expository materials. The transfer of those reading skills has been such a disappointing experience that even students who…

Provides examples of using the Directed Reading Activity as a framework for teaching students to comprehend literary text at varying levels of response. (HOD)

Evaluates the characteristics common to most reading programs and offers suggestions for keeping a program a learning rather than a testing situation. (HTH)

Presents two cross-checking activities to help K-3 students learn decoding. The cross-checking involves decoding by using the consonants in a word along with the context. Children learn to decode by thinking about two things simultaneously (what word would make sense in a sentence and the word's letters and sounds). (SM)

Noting that "every pupil response" (EPR) techniques allow for all students in a group to respond to each question asked by a teacher, this paper explains how EPR techniques may be incorporated in a reading lesson to help students develop decoding ability. The paper offers a justification for using these directed teaching strategies based on…