There are five skills that we see in all good readers. These skills are necessary for readers to recognise words easily and quickly, focus on the meaning of the words they are reading and make sense of what they have read.
It is very common for people to say to me that their child reads but doesn't understand. This is not reading.
It makes sense that if there is no prior knowledge, then there is nothing to activate. Students often study topics they know very little about (that is why, after all, that they attend school!) and therefore teachers must think of ways of providing the necessary background knowledge quickly and efficiently.
As external exams become a larger part of the Queensland senior school experience, it is vital teachers prepare students to be able to work out the meaning of an unfamiliar word without consulting a dictionary or a mobile phone.
Viewing a video clip should always be purposeful and students need to be accountable for the time they have spent viewing it. In this blog post, Pat Hipwell looks at how to make students pay attention and learn from videos.
Automatic recall of what words mean makes learning efficient. During these times when many students will be spending a lot of time learning online, it’s a good idea for them to spend time developing their vocabulary.
Questioning to ascertain prior knowledge is a very popular practice, but there is a danger when posing questions to the whole group that we only get a sense of what a few students know rather than everyone.
