Reading is fundamental to developing the mind, imagination, curiosity, and confidence. This course is designed with a multifaceted, student-centered approach to provide students with mini lessons and fun activities that will give them opportunities to expand and develop their vocabulary, grammar and mechanics, to gain confidence with reading out loud and independently, as well as to improve reading comprehension skills.

Throughout this course, students will continue to build on their reading proficiency and practice a variety of strategies designed to improve reading comprehension and critical thinking skills.  Students will learn and apply reading strategies, enhance their vocabulary, and improve their grammar as they explore real-world topics using National Geographic’s Reach Higher. Each week, students will also be introduced to a news article and practice strategies to analyze nonfiction informational texts.  Students will also have opportunities to discover and analyze poetry as a new poem is explored each week.  This well rounded, interactive reading course will challenge and engage students through various literary genres.  

Reading skills that will be covered include but are not limited to:

• Expanding vocabulary
• Exploring fiction and nonfiction genres
• Identifying the main idea & details
• Sequencing
• Fluency

• Story Elements
• Drawing conclusions & making inferences
• Identifying cause & effect
• Fact vs. Opinion
• Making predictions

• Summarizing
• Questioning
• Visualizing
• Synthesizing
• Narrative Point-of-View

• Identifying author’s purpose
• Making connections within and between texts
• Comparing and contrasting
• Understanding figurative language
• Becoming active readers through annotating

• And Much More!

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• Students will be provided with all course and reading material during each lesson.  
• Each student should come prepared with a notepad and pen, as well as a growth mindset!
• In addition to completing the suggested post-reading assignments each week, students are encouraged to practice independent reading at least 20-30 minutes a day with a text of their own choosing.