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Writing ABC Books to Enhance Reading Comprehension
|Grades||3 – 5|
|Lesson Plan Type||Standard Lesson|
|Estimated Time||Four 50-minute sessions|
Comprehension requires more than knowledge of the basic facts in a reading. Instead, readers need to actively in engage in their readings to move toward critical thinking. After reading a piece of literature, students explore their text, searching for literary elements such as characters, setting, figures of speech, and themes. They use the alphabet to organize their findings. Finally, they publish their work in ABC books, using the Alphabet Organizer student interactive.
Alphabet Organizer: Students can use this online tool to organize any topic in alphabetical order and to print alphabet charts or pages for an alphabet book.
Reading comprehension is often linked to understanding. However there is more to comprehending than simply "getting" what you read. In his article from Voices from the Middle, Robert Probst takes a look at his own comprehension and the strategies he uses while reading. He concludes, "Comprehension is too complex to be effectively assessed with anything so simple and reductive as a test, and it isn't achieved by concentrating solely on the text itself, though of course that does require close attention. Instead, to comprehend requires a concerted effort to see through the text to what lies beyond. And that demands an imaginative and committed reader." If we as adults understand this, then we need to look at how we assess our students' comprehension.
Probst, Robert E. "Responding to Reading: You Know What I Mean?" Voices from the Middle 11.1 (September 2003): 56-57.