Into the Book: A Website to Help Support Teaching Reading Strategies

Hi everyone!  It's Kim from Elementary Antics.  Today I'm going to be telling you about a little website that can provide some great support for teaching those reading strategies.  It's called Into the Book.  This site is FREE and provided and developed by the Wisconsin Media Lab and Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.  It features a lot of cool stuff to help you with planning and teaching eight learning strategies: using prior knowledge, making connections, questioning, visualizing, inferring, summarizing, evaluating and synthesizing.  (The only strategy it's missing that I also liked to teach is determining the importance.)  It also provides some great student resources to practice these strategies too!

Its student website features interactive reading comprehension activities for all the strategies. This site was originally made for 3rd graders, but I think high 2nd graders through 5th or 6th grade would benefit as well. Students can choose to get the activities in English or Spanish (good for some ELL students).  They can create an easy login using just their name.  Once they enter their name they will get a key passcode using their name and some numbers.  Or you can just choose "Skip Login" and still get to all the activities- super easy!

Once students choose a strategy to practice they watch a quick video that explains the strategy and how to use it in the activity. Then, there is usually get a choice of activities.  In this Questioning activity there were 6 different stories to choose from!  

I chose "Life in a Castle".  I looked at the cover and had to write a question I had, then I read one section and was prompted to write a question I had about what I read. This story had about 5 sections to read. Throughout, you are reminded to go back and answer any of your previous questions that you found an answer to while reading (I really liked that part!).  There is also a feature where the text can be read aloud, so even students below level could still practice the strategy.

I imagine some of these could be done together as part of a class lesson or small group lesson too.  These would also be wonderful for a computer center. 

In addition to the student activities, there is a teacher tools tab that features video clips, posters, teacher's guides, short lesson plan activities, book lists and even a song.  There truly is a lot of resources that would be great to help with planning any lessons teaching these strategies- lots to pull from!  You just have to go check it out for yourself. :)

I loved using reading strategy posters in my classroom to display after teaching a strategy. I also would shrink them when copying or printing and have my students put them in their interactive notebooks to refer to throughout the year.  

Grab this Paw Print Theme Reading Strategy Posters freebie in my store!