Reading Strategies

I would like to share with you some of the things that we are doing to grow professionally as a staff. At this week’s staff meeting we introduced the book, Strategies That Work by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis. This book is recognized as the definitive work on teaching comprehension monitoring strategies. For years teachers and parents alike have assumed to some degree or another that once students could read effectively (at about the fourth grade level), that they also could comprehend everything they were able to read. Not so. We have many wonderful decoders out there and students who have exceptional word recognition, but who do not understand what they have read. The fact is, comprehension needs to be taught at every level. Have you ever read some text as an adult that you found hard to understand? What did you do to make sense of what you read? What strategies did you employ? The staff at GMS will be reading Strategies That Work in order to learn more about how to help students at all levels become more strategic readers. We began our investigation on Friday. We are also going to be looking carefully at what we consider to be our approach to writing. We will be employing the 6+1 Trait Writing Approach which is a logical progression of seven sets of skills necessary to be an effective writer. These two initiatives will be the focus of our professional development for the rest of the year. Next year we will have in place a reasonable school-wide writing program that identifies standards for writing at each grade level. The 6+1 Writing Traits Approach will be employed with the objective of having all students reach a grade level standard that we have identified as a result of this year’s investigation.


If you Google 6+1 Writing Traits you may find The Northern Nevada Writing Project and the McRel site from which we will download much of the material that we will use to implement this program. Or go to www.nwrel.org and www.writingfix.com for more information.


Our second theme, Ancient Cultures – Modern Times is moving along quite well. In theme studies students are working on projects as they investigate the countries of the Middle East and Liz Bolton has begun her Hebrew classes that students will attend once a week. We will be planning a field trip to a mosque and an embassy in the near future and if you have any ideas for how that might look, I would welcome your input. And as always, we hope that our wonderfully diverse community can be tapped to add to our understanding during this theme. Please let me know how you would like to contribute to our investigations