Advice On Reading for Students...

The keys to becoming a successful reader in middle school include learning organization skills and sophisticated reading strategies. Laura Hendrick, a literacy coach in Santa Rosa, California, has these suggestions for students:

• Create an organization system at home. Keep binders neat and have a file for completed papers.

• Practice reading. Read every day and particularly during the summer – the more practice the better. It doesn’t matter what genre you read, just make sure you are reading.

• Read questions at the end of each textbook chapter before reading the chapter; use headings and subheadings as cues.

• In their book, Reading for Understanding: A Guide to Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms, authors Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia Greenleaf, Christine Cziko and Lori Hurwitz advise the following for students who get confused when reading a text:

• Ignore the unclear part and read on to see if it gets clearer.

• Reread the unclear part.

• Reread the sentence(s) before the unclear part.

• Try to connect the unclear part to something you already know.