Introduction to Reading Comprehension

The purpose of reading is to obtain meaning from written text. In order to get meaning from text, students must possess the skills and tools needed to comprehend a piece of writing. Students will be taught reading strategies to assist them in becoming proficient readers to achieve their academic goals and success in reading. Students will be required to participate in classroom discussions and classroom activities.

* Week 1 -  We will cover topics: What is Reading Comprehension? Why is reading comprehension important?  The topic of the week will be 'annotation'. Students will learn about annotation from lecture and classroom activity. What is annotation? Why is it important? Students will be taught why annotating is important and how to annotate text for better understanding. They will practice annotating text through classroom activity.
* Week 2 - Day (1) Topic and Main Idea: The main idea is always integral to reading comprehension. Knowing and identifying the main idea of written text is required of all grade-levels. Students will be taught how to identify the main idea through lecture and classroom exercises.
 Day (2) - Review Topic and Main Idea; The 5 W's - Who? What? When? Where? Why? 
* Week 3 - Day (1) Vocabulary Awareness - While reading, students may encounter words that are incomprehensible. Not knowing the meaning of a word in a text could negatively affect the understanding of the entire written piece. Students will be taught how to identify context clues to decipher the meaning of an unknown word.
Day (2) Graphic Organizer - A visual aid maybe needed to assist with reading comprehension. Students will be taught how to construct a graphic organizer to help them understand and remember details of a written text.
* Week 4 - Day (1) Answering Comprehension Questions: RAFT (Restating the question, Answering the question, For example, Tie in your response). After using reading comprehension tools to understand text, students should be able to adequately answer reading comprehension questions. Students will be taught how to answer reading comprehension questions using the RAFT method.
 Day (2) Recap. We will review all the topics learn from the past week. Students will participate in classroom discussion and activities.

For this course, students are required to be able to read  on their grade-level.