4 Nonfiction Reading Skills to Teach Before State Testing

Kirsten 1:06

This is the social studies teacher podcast, a show for busy elementary teachers looking for fun and engaging ways to easily add social studies into their classroom schedule without feeling overwhelmed or pressed for time. I'm curious to know if you southern teach an educator and mom who is passionate about all things, social studies, I love sharing ideas and strategies that are low prep and easy to implement. So let's dive in together.

Welcome to another episode of the social studies teacher podcast. hope your day's been going well, so far. We all know that something is happening in the next few months. And we might be looking towards them feeling anticipation, sometimes dread sometimes even rage. You might be thinking, well, what are you talking about? And that would be state testing. My friends who can forget those district wide statewide assessments, standardized testing, the ones we love or just hate to love so much. Regardless about how we feel about state testing, they do highlight some skills that our students can improve on. And those skills are definitely worth teaching before. We have to have them take those state tests, whether it's their first time or maybe they've been doing it for several years. So I'm going to be sharing with you four common reading skills. I've noticed my students struggled with the most on school assessments and district assessments and ultimately, state testing assessment. This is something kind of just over the years, I've noticed needed a lot of extra work.

The first one, you're probably gonna guess this, maybe you may, you may or may not, but this one was a big one inferencing. When students are young and still stuck in the literal phase of their thinking, it can be a lot harder for them to understand information when it's not directly stated. So this is why and fencing has always perpetually been a challenge for a lot of my students. Applying previously learned knowledge to new information is another way that inferencing can be hard to kids. So in order to help students with this, you can provide opportunities to practice making use of their background knowledge or schema, combining it with clues they find from the text. So I like to do like a little equation, background knowledge and context clues. Then you can make your inference. I do have a graphic organizer bundle that has the Perfect inferencing handout that can model exactly this equation. And it can pretty much be used with any text. So I'll make sure to link that graphic organizer bundle in the links in the show notes.

The second common reading skill that I think is so important to make sure to really review is context clues. Many kids may not have the background information on unfamiliar words, especially if English is not their primary language, they may not know how to find the meaning of a word, using the different clues from the text. In order to help students overcome this, you can explicitly teach them how to pay attention to the words before and after the unfamiliar word. Make an educated guess. Check their guests to see if it makes sense, using other clues, such as pictures in the text, and then using answer choices to fill in and eliminate if it's a multiple choice question. This takes a lot of practice. But I do think that it's definitely worthwhile. There are state tests that do allow dictionaries and allow students to look up words. And I think it's very important that you teach students those dictionary skills so that if they do not know what an unfamiliar word is, they have the ability to look that up. So a providing them the skills with utilizing and finding words in the dictionary or thesaurus can also be very helpful. That's why I say like this, pretty much these two skills can be taught with any text. This is a great way to integrate social studies. With inferencing, you can have some type of nonfiction texts. And students are making inferences about certain people in history, or certain topics relating to social studies that might be aligned with what you are supposed to be teaching based on your curriculum. Same with context, because there's always different types of texts you can use that are related to social studies, and combine them with teaching reading with context clues.

The third, reading skill to teach would be text features. When students are given a new text sometimes students may not be familiar with the features and the purpose of why it's there in the text. This can be especially hard if there's some type of social studies newsletter or social studies resource where there's a lot of captions and photographs and a lot of just different blurbs that you don't normally see in a traditional book or chapter book. We can pre teach this skill in a few different ways. But my favorite activity is to utilize a text feature hunt, students can select their own nonfiction book of choice in any subject, and use the text feature graphic organizer in that graphic bundle, the graphic organizer bundle that I mentioned to identify text features, make sure that when they're finding it, they're able to discuss what it is the purpose and how it enhances or helps the reader understand the text. Usually I had my students in small groups identify the text features, right the purpose of how it helps the reader on just a plain old sticky note, then we would share as a class or in the small groups depending on who I'm working with.

And then the last reading skill would be the theme. You can easily find the theme in a lot of social studies books out there, so selecting different text should not be a problem. Identifying themes can be very, very tricky, even probably more so than inferencing. It's kind of a toss up. Students often have difficulty applying previous learned knowledge to new information. And also like inferencing it can be hard for students to understand information when it's not directly stated. We can structure this for students by showing them how to break down texts. You can have them practice determining the big idea, as well as important details in the plot, or biography or whatever the text is about. And then you can also ask students what the reader can learn from the story.

The graphic organizers that I have for all four of these that I mentioned inferencing context clues, text features theme, it's really helpful because it helps scaffold the process for them. It's a great way for them to eventually get the hang of it. These graphic organizers are also great for fiction and nonfiction. And it's a great way to just reteach with your students and go over in detail All breaking it down in small groups, it's a great way to break down important reading skills. And if you're also looking for practice multiple choice texts that are geared to upper elementary, I also have reading comprehension test cards, the bundle can be for every month of the year, there's one for every month of the year. They're engaging in fun. They spiral the same reading skills throughout the year. And there's three sets of task cards for each month. So definitely check out both the comprehension task cards if you're looking for something kind of to practice those state testing comprehension skills. Or if you need to break it down even further with each type of reading skill. I definitely recommend that graphic organizer bundle.

All right. Well, that is it for today. Bye, guys. Thanks for listening to the social studies teacher podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, hit that subscribe button and leave a review. I would love to hear your thoughts. You can also find me on Instagram at the southern teach. I can't wait for you to join me in the next episode for more teacher tips and strategies.