Teacher background

Mosaic Listserv
This site is a great place to meet and share ideas with other teachers who are interested in comprehension strategies instruction. It was inspired by the book "Mosaic of Thought" and is now hosted on the readinglady.com Web site.

Wisconsin Literacy and Reading Network Source (WILearns)
This site offers information for teachers and parents on comprehension strategies, as well as on vocabulary, fluency, decoding, and other aspects of literacy instruction.

Language Arts Professional Resources
The Madison Metropolitan School District Language Arts Department provides resources on using comprehension strategies in elementary classrooms.

Reading Comprehension Strategies for Content Learning
This page from Colorin Colorado, a bilingual Web site for families and educators, focuses on the use of strategies with English Language Learners.

AdLit: Reading Strategies
The Adolescent Literacy site from the Ohio Resource Center for Mathematics, Science and Reading is designed for middle school, but many of the ideas could be adapted for younger students.

Literature Circles Resource Center
This is just one of the many sites dedicated to using Literature Circles in the elementary classroom. Literature circles are a great way to give your students the opportunity to use their comprehension strategies in an authentic context. Students who have been explicitly taught these strategies will possess the vocabulary and knowledge base from which to conduct thoughtful book discussions. You could even assign students roles based on the strategies (connector, visualizer, summarizer, evaluator, synthesizer, etc.).

Web Watch: Comprehension Resources
This article from the International Reading Association's Reading Online provides a summary of research and links to online sources for information on comprehension strategies.

Comprehension Instruction: What Makes Sense Now, What Might Make Sense Soon
This article from the International Reading Association's Reading Online summarizes a number of well-validated ways to increase comprehension skills in students through instruction.

Building Comprehension through Explicit Teaching of Comprehension Strategies
These are notes from a presentation by Nell Duke to the Second Annual MRA/CIERA Conference in 2001, from the CIERA Web site library.

Strategy Rubrics
The Walnut Creek school district has developed rubrics for assessing student use of seven comprehension strategies.

Look way ahead for a moment, and imagine how successful your students will be in high school if they learn these strategies now. You're giving them a solid foundation that will help them make meaning from text for rest of their lives. Pat yourself on the back as you check out these sites for older students.
Super Read! Strategies for Effective Reading in Biology
Building Literacy in Social Studies: Strategies for Improving Comprehension and Critical Thinking
ReadingQuest.org

Student Activity Sites

Let's Talk About Stories: Shared Discussion With Amazing Grace
This lesson gives second-grade students opportunities to interact with a thought-provoking story as they develop their reading, writing, oral, and critical-thinking skills. Students will be encouraged to question, make connections and inferences, and evaluate as they participate in this discussion.
From Read-Write-Think, the International Reading Association

Developing a Living Definition of Reading in the Elementary Classroom
Students will investigate the reading process and end up with a working definition of reading. This might be an activity to try at the beginning of the year, then return to after students have become comfortable with the reading comprehension strategies to see how their definitions may have changed.
From Read-Write-Think, the International Reading Association

Peace Poems and Picasso Doves: Literature, Art, Technology, and Poetry
This lesson supports third- through fifth-grade students as they apply think-aloud strategies to reading, as well as to the composition of artwork and poetry. Technology tools are integrated as students research symbols of peace and as they prewrite, compose, and publish their poetry. The think-aloud technique (e.g., questioning, accessing prior knowledge, and making inferences or predictions) helps students recognize the strategies they are using to understand a text.
From Read-Write-Think, the International Reading Association

Guided Comprehension: Summarizing Using the QuIP Strategy
Based on the Guided Comprehension Model developed by Maureen McLaughlin and Mary Beth Allen, this lesson introduces students to the comprehension strategy of summarizing. Students learn how to summarize information using the QuIP (questions into paragraphs) strategy, a technique that involves graphically organizing information and synthesizing it in writing.
From Read-Write-Think, the International Reading Association

Reading Informational Texts Using the 3-2-1 Strategy
In this lesson plan for grade K-2 presents the "3-2-1 strategy", students write down three things they discovered, two things they found interesting, and one question they still have. This is a simple way to encourage young students to use multiple strategies as they read. You could modify the strategy and graphic organizer to ask students for "three things you already know, two connections, and one question," or "three things you visualized, two questions, and one thing you inferred," and so forth.
From Read-Write-Think, the International Reading Association

Building a Matrix for Leo Lionni Books: An Author Study
This lesson plan helps K-2 students use multiple strategies as they discuss books the teacher reads aloud. Students are asked to use prior knowledge to make predictions, find text-to-text connections, summarize through drawing and re-telling and evaluate using a Venn diagram.