WEBVTT

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[Music Plays...]

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Narrator: Meet Charlotte Garcia, a ninth-grade teacher at Thurgood
Marshall High.

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Charlotte Garcia: For the past couple of years, I've been teaching
remedial reading. I have all kinds of kids in my class. Some with

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disabilities, some without. Some read at around the seventh-grade
level, some below the fourth. Together, they demonstrate a wide

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diversity of reading challenges.

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I feel like my group this year is beginning to make a little
progress. They're making some small steps in comprehension and

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fluency, although I think there's still a lot of room to improve.
One thing I've noticed about my kids: They seem to have a terribly

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hard time with main ideas and naming the important characters in the
stories and articles we read. For instance, we recently took a test

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on a novel we've been reading. I noticed that a pretty big number of
my students missed a question asking what the main character's

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motivation was in a certain key scene. Their answers were just all
over the place. Later we talked about this in class, and I began to

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realize that my students had missed the question because they didn't
really know who the main character was to begin with.

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I'd like my students to be able to discern "big picture" kinds of
things about a piece of writing—who are the most important

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characters and what is the main idea?—but I'm not sure where to
begin.

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Here's your Challenge:

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What characteristics might Mrs. Garcia look for in a reading
approach?

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What types of activities can Mrs. Garcia use to increase her
students' reading skills?

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How can Mrs. Garcia implement these activities?