How Smart Readers Think

No matter what subject you teach, what grade you are teaching, or the kids education background, your students are going to be all over the map with their reading skills. Most often than not, teachers ask their students to read passages to the class. There are always kids that constantly raise their hand to read and there are others that immediately shrink into their chairs, wanting nothing to do with reading out loud. A lot of this boils down to what the students believe their ability to be and their confidence behind their reading skills.

As teachers, the most important thing to realize is that, no matter what subject you are teaching, you are always to educate and guide students to better their reading ability. Every subject has different ways of interpreting text and requires a different set of skills and thinking for the reader to fully understand the text. This is why it is crucial to comprehend the stages of reading and fully taking in all information. Something as simple as reading the title of a passage can provide prior knowledge for the reader to then to fully interpret the meaning behind what you are about to read.  

Prior knowledge is what creates understanding. It is crucial, as a teacher, to help your students learn how to activate their prior knowledge so they can take new information and remember it. Students use new knowledge, attach it, and connect it with prior information they already knew. By doing this, it allows the student to remember what they read and find a better understand of the meaning of the text. Teachers are a crucial piece of the puzzle when it comes to always guiding and showing student how to use these skills to read and then understand what the passage is saying.