No matter the career path students select to follow, they will spend a lot of time reading. Whether this is textbooks or manuals, building comprehension at a young age is essential. Since comprehension includes many aspects, it takes time, practice, and patience. However, students also need to enjoy reading to see the true importance of the words on the page. Thus, teachers work hard to select engaging read-alouds and high-quality lessons to show students how excellent books are. Luckily, the Tops & Bottoms Read-Aloud Activities for Comprehension will make planning a breeze while ensuring students love reading!
Building Comprehension in Students
Read-alouds are an incredible way to build comprehension in students. In addition to reading aloud being a foundation for literary development, children also learn fluency, questing, and building connections.
As students listen to a story, they develop fundamental understanding and skills. Additionally, they can read about complex ideas with the support of a teacher. While reading, the teacher can stop and discuss along the way. These may be topics on how characters handle their emotions, diversity, and societal issues. Or, students can learn how to care for different animals, the importance of being kind, and how to brush their teeth. Honestly, so much discussion can occur with each book!
Interactive Read-Aloud
Students are not just sitting on a carpet listening when using the stories above, such as Tops and Bottoms. Instead, they do the thinking work while the teacher does the reading work. This is essential as research shows that the person doing the most talking is the one who is doing the most learning. Hence, every lesson helps students talk about prediction, visualization, retelling, text details, building connections, inferences, and character analysis. Honestly, students will fall in love with read-aloud time!
Read-Aloud Lessons: Tops and Bottoms
This resource has four incredible stories to help students work on comprehension, responding to literature, sentence studies, and enjoyable crafts. Everything is highly engaging for students and requires the teacher just to print and purchase the book! Thus, teachers will save so much time while planning.
The four included stories are:
- Tops & Bottoms by Janet Stevens
- Piggie Pie by Margie Palatini
- Hey, Little Ant by Phillip and Hannah Hoose
- Chickens Aren’t the Only Ones by Ruth Heller
Each story includes EVERYTHING carefully planned out to teach an interactive read-aloud! Honestly, the scripted lessons and high-quality activities will get your students reading like never before.
Read-Aloud Lesson Components
The Tops & Bottoms read-aloud activities for comprehension are research-based to help students see their growth throughout the year.
To help every student learn to the best of their ability, each book includes:
- 5 Day Interactive read-aloud discussion lesson plans
- Activities that focus on reading comprehension strategies
- Various response pages to select ones that are best for your students
- Full color pictorial retelling cards
- Tier 2 vocabulary practice
- Writing activities that support students where they are
- Anchor charts focusing on comprehension strategies
- Sentence studies and activities
- Grammar studies
- Phonics lessons for kindergarten and first grade
- Crafts that all students will love
To truly make this a teacher-friendly resource, there are even rubrics for each activity. Furthermore, there are true/false and multiple-choice assessments.
The Tops & Bottoms Read-Aloud Activities for Comprehension center around brain research that proves comprehension starts with listening. Since our youngest students have stronger listening skills than decoding, the activities focus on listening and discussion. Ultimately, students will have so much fun working on these skills that they won’t even realize how much work they are doing!
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