I have always loved reading and still do. English I’m not so good at. If I had known how much time I would spend writing I would have paid more attention.
There are a ton of resources on this page –
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Literacy/reading.asp
From the National Writing Project – a list of 30 ideas for teaching writing.
http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/922
My favorite is number 27 –
— quote —
27. Think like a football coach.
In addition to his work as a high school teacher of writing, Dan Holt, a co-director with the Third Coast Writing Project (Michigan), spent 20 years coaching football. While doing the latter, he learned quite a bit about doing the former. Here is some of what he found out:
The writing teacher can’t stay on the sidelines. “When I modeled for my players, they knew what I wanted them to do.” The same involvement, he says, is required to successfully teach writing.
Like the coach, the writing teacher should praise strong performance rather than focus on the negative. Statements such as “Wow, that was a killer block,” or “That paragraph was tight” will turn “butterball” ninth-grade boys into varsity linemen and insecure adolescents into aspiring poets.
The writing teacher should apply the KISS theory:Â Keep it simple stupid. Holt explains for a freshman quarterback, audibles (on-field commands) are best used with care until a player has reached a higher skill level. In writing class, a student who has never written a poem needs to start with small verse forms such as a chinquapin or haiku.
Practice and routine are important both for football players and for writing students, but football players and writers also need the “adrenaline rush” of the big game and the final draft.
HOLT, DAN. 1999. “What Coaching Football Taught Me about Teaching Writing.” The Voice (4) 3.
— end quote —
Here are some good assessment tools and some ways for figuring out what your student may need help with.
Here is a 117 page pdf that has an excellent reading assessment tool within it. You can right click and save as to save the file to your computer.
http://www.paec.org/itrk3/files/pdfs/readingpdfs/cooltoolsall.pdf
It’s from the Florida department of education.
It takes you thru steps to test –
- phonological awarenessÂ
- Â phonicsÂ
- Â fluencyÂ
- Â vocabularyÂ
- Â text comprehension