Take & Teach Lesson
Book of the Month
The Certificate
How do I support students who are reading more challenging texts?
This is a question many teachers struggle with once students have progressed beyond the early stages of reading development.
Being able to decode fluently is a major milestone in the literacy journey, but it’s not the end of the road!
Proficient reading is so much more than fluent decoding.
According to the active view of reading, reading is not merely a simple process of decoding and comprehension. It’s an active one that incorporates motivation, engagement, executive function skills, and strategy use (Duke & Cartwright, 2021).
Advancing readers need support digging deeper into increasingly complex texts, using more advanced reading strategies, and applying what they learn about texts. While these students are, in many ways, independent readers, teacher guidance in small groups is still needed.
Knowing how to support advancing readers is not easy. That is why JillE Literacy builds systematic support into every resource, which targets the key skills students need at their developmental level. This saves planning time and takes the guesswork out of supporting students in small groups.
In JillE Literacy, each small-group book has a student version and a teaching version. In these examples from The Certificate, you can see that the teaching version on the right is identical to the student version in every way except the additional teaching panel, which includes notes for guiding the lesson in real time and for taking advantage of the many instructional opportunities purposefully embedded in the text.
Using JillE Literacy is like having an experienced literacy coach beside you every step of the way.
The teaching panels are full of support that is specifically tailored for advancing readers and that covers skills across all strands of literacy as well as social-emotional learning. In The Certificate, the teaching panels include instruction in all the following skills and strategies, spread across three separate readings.
PREVIEW/VIEW
(First Reading)
Questions and prompts that support fluency and understanding
- Self-monitoring
- Making inferences
- Asking and answering questions
- Making and confirming predictions
- Making connections
- Visualizing
- Justifying opinions
- Clarifying vocabulary and idioms
Word Analysis Strategies
- Using letter sounds and spelling patterns
- Looking for word parts
- Rereading and looking for meaning clues
REVIEW
(Second Reading)
Digging deeper into specific text elements and comprehension strategies
- Making connections
- Making and confirming predictions
- Descriptive language
- Making inferences
- Text and graphic features
Social-Emotional Learning
- Building relationships
- Making personal connections
- Perspective-taking
- Empathy
- Understanding individual differences
- Identifying emotions
- Interpreting gestures and facial expressions
- Risk-taking
- Analyzing situations and choices
- Evaluating consequences
- Resisting social pressure
WRITING REVIEW
(Third Reading)
Revisiting the text to examine elements of the story from a writing perspective
- Showing and telling
- Dialogue
Partner Talk & Going Solo Activities
- Using specific nouns and strong verbs to describe an experience to a partner
- Writing a description using precise language
- Analyzing word choices in another story
Response & Extension Activities
- Writing
- Speaking & Listening
- Understanding Visuals
- Vocabulary & Language
- Understanding Text
The Partner Talk and Going Solo activities below are included in both versions of the book and are further supported by a printable graphic organizer. In these activities, student talk builds a bridge from reading to writing, a practice that helps students recognize that if they can say it, they can write it.
The Certificate comes from the Grade 2 Small-Group Resources kit but can be used by any students at a Level N instructional reading level. Download the accompanying Take & Teach Lesson and Blackline Masters below for further support for English learners, social-emotional learning, and a variety of extension activities.
Sign up or log in to read the book and to download the Take & Teach Lesson and Blackline Masters from the Related Resources section below.
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Last Month's Book (login required)
Check back next month for a brand-new JillE Literacy book to share with your students!
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