Outline	Summary
SQ3R Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review. Skill in Focus: Asking questions on various levels.	SKWrL Survey, Know, Wonder, Read, Learned. Skill in Focus: Identify main ideas.
History Frame Skill in Focus: View the text as a process of problem solving or goal attainment; reading with purpose.	Oracle Skill in Focus: Predictions
Beginner Primary Source Interpretation Form A detailed guide for beginners in analyzing primary source documents.	Standard Primary Source Interpretation Form An advanced guide for analyzing primary source documents.
Strategic Reading Plan For Freshmen who no longer need the "training forms" (SQ3R, SKWRL, etc), this form helps them guide themsleves through pre-reading and post-reading study.	Book Assignment Rubric Answering textbook questions for homework is sometimes a necessary assignment. Here are the guidelines for questions on the level of Knowledge and Comprehension.
Fiction Book or Video Report Guide	Nonfiction Book or Video Report
Political Cartoon Analysis Guide This is a work in progress...	Historical Photograph Analysis Guide A guide for students analyzing period photographs.

I took my MA degree from SUNY Plattsburgh. My major was educational studies with a concentration in teaching reading. Little in my own education changed the way I teach as much as did the reading courses I took in that program.

The first 4 techniques above (namely SQ3R, SKWrL, History Frame, and Oracle) represent the bulk of the "meat and potatoes" activities of the day-to-day work in grade 7. You may recognize them as variations on old techniques commonly recognized by reading teachers.

Although each of the four basic techniques call upon the student to exercise a particular skill, they all have been adapted to develop schema activation (the student considers what he already knows before and while reading), prediction, comprehension activities like identifying the main idea, skilled questioning, and review.

Although I do make use of textbook publications like questions for review, students learn mostly to become their own questioners. They are trained to recognize and develop different types of questions based on Bloom's Taxonomy.

The types of reading skills addressed in this course are:

• Using context to figure out the meaning of new words
• "Reading with a purpose"; knowing what one is looking for
• Calling up personal experiences before and while reading to make connections with the text. This helps the reader understand and retain the information
• Learning to recognize the the most common organization of textbook reading material. Knowing how text is organized helps students understand what they read.
• Prediction; Strong readers make quick, mental predictions as they read and then examine whether they were right. This is a way strong readers understand well what they read.
• Organizing the reading and "processing" it for study later. This usually involves some sort of outline or questions created for the text. Doing this helps students have a study paper for later as well as helping them understand the text by causing them to consider how the ideas in the text relate to one another.

Read Time - Textbook reading assignments happen almost exclusively in class, usually for 8-15 minute intervals. Students read silently under my supervision and earn credit. In some traditional situations, students often avoid really reading their textbooks. They skim for answers to a set of questions at the end of the chapter and copy the portion of the text that they think answers the question. This "search-and-copy" method hurts students in two ways: Firstly, they get out of the habit of "deep reading" their textbooks. They read poorly because they are actually reading less. They are missing out on the context and explanations that lend themselves to remembering the material on a long-term basis. Secondly, by copying responses verbatim out of the text, they are not providing evidence that they understand what was asked, they probably do not understand it, and will probably not retain it. Learning happens when we make connections with what we already know, called our "schema". Students make information "theirs" when they connect it with their own knowledge and stating something in their own words helps this process.