by Michele Landis and Dr. Jack Dempsey
As teachers prepare for another school year, we too are preparing for another year of helping teachers improve their students’ reading comprehension outcomes. As Rebecca Torchia points out in her EdTech Focus on K-12 article, “reading comprehension is as important in science, technology, engineering and math as it is in language arts classes” – and Cascade Reading can help! In this blog, we’ll outline FOUR ABSOLUTELY FREE tools & tips for how all educators can use our tools to optimize student achievement.
Many educators use different online resources to help aid in their lessons, and these websites usually include readings to supplement or even constitute the core curriculum. As students begin to move from learning to read to reading to learn, a transfer that’s expected to take place as early as 4th grade, a great deal of them continue to struggle with reading comprehension skills and may start to show difficulties in other subjects.
The Cascade Reading Browser View is a free, ready-to-use web tool that works on any laptop, Chromebook, or tablet via the Google Chrome Browser. Once downloaded through the Chrome Extension Store, students can instantly convert whatever text they are reading on a website into the Cascade Format, and they can revert back to traditional block text with the touch of a button!
Not only can this help your students better understand the reading material, it can also help them become stronger readers via the Cascade Format’s implicit cues to sentence structure. This tool is a must have for educators and readers everywhere!
Tip #2: Use the Cascade Explorer View to Improve Reading & Writing
In case you missed it, our blog series this spring outlined three specific exercises with which teachers can use the Cascade Explorer View to help teach sentence structure for both reading and writing.
To check these out, click the links below!
Summarizing Readings
Forming Complex Sentences
Comparing Styles of Writing
The Cascade Explorer View is a flexible tool for teachers to provide their students with a detailed look at parts of speech and how they relate to one another. This can boost confidence in teaching grammar, something that’s not everyone’s favorite subject – but it doesn’t have to stay that way! Students can also use Explorer to automatically convert text into the Cascade Format to fit their needs. Writing improvements can be achieved by simply pasting a student’s first draft into the Explorer View and leveraging its tools to automatically identify parts of speech and syntactic categories, showcasing specific elements of sentence structure for students learning syntax. The Cascade Explorer View can help in so many ways to improve your comprehension of written English and to write effectively.
Tip #3: Use our Reading Passage Library for Independent Reading in the Cascade Format
We recently updated our Passage Library, offering 195 unique passage sets leveled across seven different grade levels corresponding to CKLA curriculum units. This is a great way to offer supplemental reading to your students who have the extra time or may benefit from extra reading practice. Not only are these passages in the Cascade Format, providing cues to meaning for students not found in standard text, but each passage also comes with fourteen assessment questions so you can monitor your students’ reading comprehension progress!
