Stellar Teacher Podcast with Sara Marye

If students aren’t interested in the text they aren’t going to participate in a discussion. If we take a step back and reflect on what we’re prompting our students with after they read, you’ll probably notice that all the questions are directly related to the text. “Who is the main character?” and “Where does the story take place?” are not the types of questions I am going to be sharing with you today, but I promise that you will not be disappointed with your student’s responses!

To end this month’s series I am excited to talk about my favorite nonfiction topic, which is nonfiction text structure. It wasn’t until I started teaching fourth grade that I even heard of the term nonfiction text structure. I quickly realized how important it is to teach and how it relates to so many different skills needed for nonfiction texts. I explain this in detail as well as tips for explicitly teaching text structure every chance you get!

This week’s reading skill that we will be focusing on is identifying the theme of a story. I’ve come to realize that there are many ways that “theme” can be interpreted. Since everyone has different backgrounds, teaching the abstract concept of theme can be increasingly more difficult especially as you get into higher grades. I hope these strategies I share are helpful and that you’ll join me next week for the last episode of the reading comprehension mini-series!

Today’s episode is the second of this month’s Reading Comprehension Skill Series and will be focused on main idea. More specifically, finding the main idea in nonfiction texts. I remember when I used to teach my students by using an elaborate lesson and telling them they needed to do the same. What I realized was that after all the time I spent, I wasn’t showing my students how to find the main idea themselves.