The Product
Reader’s Toolkit offers a multilevel, hands on approach to guide students through research based reading strategies designed to help them comprehend and remember the printed word. The students are 100% on task and engaged in this fun and exciting learning process. Within one year of students using the Reader’s Toolkit, state assessment individual scores were increased from the previous year. This fun, easy to use tool is essential to utilize with students to increase reading comprehension by learning and mastering reading strategies. Student responses on custom sticky notes provide the teacher with a valuable tool for gauging each student’s comprehension level and progress, and it opens paths for communication from student to teacher and from student to student.
Balanced Literacy Program
The Reader’s Toolkit takes six proven, research-based reading strategies and presents them in an organized, colorful, hands-on manner that is both easy to follow and engaging for the students. The Reader’s Toolkit can be used with the existing reading program of any class and with books already in your classroom. Students use the Toolkits and Custom Sticky Notes with:
Interactive Read Aloud
• How do I know my students are paying attention during read aloud?
• How do I teach reading strategies during read aloud?
• How do I use sticky notes during read aloud?
• How do I use the students’ responses to drive instruction?
Reading aloud to children is the single most important activity for building the knowledge
required for success in reading. Current research demonstrates that well planned and well
thought-out interaction before, during and after read-aloud time helps students make meaning
of text. Teacher read aloud provides a learning environment for the teacher to begin strategy
instruction. In an interactive read-aloud the teacher reads aloud but stops periodically to
ask a question or give a prompt; the students jot down a response on their sticky note, turn
and talk to a partner or small group, or share thoughts with the whole class. The teacher
models how to use the strategy and invites students to practice using the strategy and
respond on the custom sticky notes. Responses are shared and posted on anchor charts.
Authentic conversation is encouraged. Higher order questions are posed by the teacher
to accommodate individual student needs and differentiate instruction.
Why Use Strategic Reading?
Comprehension can be improved by teaching students to use specific cognitive strategies when they are reading. Strategic readers use a plan (Reader’s Toolkit) to actively construct, examine and extend meaning before, during and after reading. Learners with good metacomprehension will check for confusion or inconsistency, and undertake a corrective strategy such as making connections (relating the current information to prior knowledge).
The teacher of strategic reading develops and follows an organized plan, continually using the scaffolding technique for instruction in promoting student growth in use of the strategies. Further, the teacher facilitates authentic student discussion (100% engagement using sticky notes for responses) in which students collaborate and acquire a deeper understanding of the text.
National Reading Standards
Standards for the English Language Arts
Sponsored by NCTE and IRA
Standard # 3: Students apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate texts. They draw on their prior experience, their interactions with other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts, their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features (e.g., sound-letter correspondence, sentence structure, context, graphics).
Reader's Toolkit Utilizes Strategic Reading Standards
