Into the Book: An Excellent Resource for Teaching and Building Reading Comprehension

I LOVE this new-to-me resource! If you haven't already come across Into the Book, I suggest you high tail to it and check this out! Pure awesomeness!

Why I love it:

This site has so many wonderful downloadable resources for teachers about reading comprehension. It provides also videos and student interactives to aid in learning reading comprehension strategies. I know I will be using this site extensively next year with my struggling readers. Visit the site to see for yourself!

A Couple of (free) Gems:

Reader's Response Bookmark

Downloadables (Music, Posters, and More!)

Teaching Tips

Links to helpful websites

About the site:

Into the Book is a multimedia package designed to improve students' reading comprehension, as well as their ability to think and learn across the curriculum. Based on current research, the project focuses on eight learning strategies:

• Using prior knowledge
• Making connections
• Questioning
• Visualizing
• Inferring
• Summarizing
• Evaluating
• Synthesizing

Into the Book includes:

• student Web site featuring interactive reading comprehension activities
• teacher Web site featuring music, video clips, classroom design ideas, posters, teacher guides, lesson plans and lots more
• Into the Book video series: nine 15-minute classroom videos teaching children how to be strategic readers
• Behind the Lesson video series: nine 10-minute professional development videos that model effective ways of teaching the learning strategies

The nine Into the Book student episodes feature an extraordinary classroom where a group of ordinary students use powerful learning strategies to enter the world of the story. Programs show student viewers how to use these strategies when reading fiction, nonfiction, or everyday text. They'll also model real-life applications of the strategies. For more information, video clips, and a teacher guide to using the video programs, click on "Student Video" under each strategy.

In the professional development videos, we go Behind the Lesson as teachers demonstrate how they are using these strategies effectively with their students. Programs combine actual classroom footage with dialogue and personal reflection on instructional practices. For more information, video clips, and a slide show, click on "Teacher Video" under each strategy.

This project was developed by the Wisconsin Educational Communications Board, with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and a team of experienced educators. It is produced by Wisconsin Public Television and the Agency for Instructional Technology.

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"Teaching children which thinking strategies are used by proficient readers and helping them use those strategies independently creates the core of teaching reading. If proficient readers routinely use certain thinking strategies, those are the strategies children must be taught. For the kindergarten-through-twelfth-grade reading curriculum to focus primarily on those strategies, we need a new instructional paradigm: Our daily work with children must look dramatically different from the approaches in wide use in our schools today."

I'm linking up at  Learning All the Time. Visit to find other bloggers' fav resources of the week!

Be well! Read on!