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Free Reading Lessons. Learn more about our award-winning reading curriculum or choose one of our free Reading Lessons: Kindergarten | First | Second | Third | Fourth | Fifth SmartTutor Think…OnlineEducation’s FREE Reading Activities will increase children’s motivation to learn and help kids become better readers by teaching these necessary sub-skills: Phonics: Children learn systematic and predictable relationships between written letters and spoken sounds.Phonemic Awareness: Children learn to think about, identify and work with individual sounds in spoken words.Vocabulary: Children learn appropriate grade-level words to help them expand their vocabulary, understand what they read and communicate more effectively.Sight Words: Children learn to recognize common sight words from the Dolch and Fry word lists to increase reading fluency.Reading Comprehension: Children learn to actively construct meaning when reading both fiction and non-fiction passages.

20 Amazing and Essential Non-fiction Books to Enrich Your Library | zen habits. Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on Twitter. I’m an avid reader of fiction and just love a novel that transports me, that is so gripping that I can’t put it down. But I also enjoy a good non-fiction book, from self-help stuff to philosophy to biographies to just about anything that makes me think. After the warm reception of my post on novels (50 Amazing and Essential Novels to Enrich Your Library), a number of people asked for a list of non-fiction as well. Well, here it is! I was hesitant to do this as there are so many classic non-fiction texts, from the Greeks to philosophers through the ages to biographies of amazing people to first-hand accounts of surviving wars and much more.

But then I decided not to be comprehensive. So this list is far, far from being authoritative or comprehensive. This list is just a few of my favorites. Your Money or Your Life, by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robins. Bonus update — I forgot a few that I really want to add to this list. To My Old Master. In 1864, after 32 long years in the service of his master, Jourdon Anderson and his wife, Amanda, escaped a life of slavery when Union Army soldiers freed them from the plantation on which they had been working so tirelessly. They grasped the opportunity with vigour, quickly moved to Ohio where Jourdon could find paid work with which to support his growing family, and didn’t look back.

Then, a year later, shortly after the end of the Civil War, Jourdon received a desperate letter from Patrick Henry Anderson, the man who used to own him, in which he was asked to return to work on the plantation and rescue his ailing business. Jourdon’s reply to the person who enslaved his family, dictated from his home on August 7th, is everything you could wish for, and quite rightly was subsequently reprinted in numerous newspapers. Jourdon Anderson never returned to Big Spring, Tennessee. He passed away in 1907, aged 81, and is buried alongside his wife who died six years later. 700 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free. Down­load a Free Audio­book from Audi­ble and also AudioBooks.com Down­load hun­dreds of free audio books, most­ly clas­sics, to your MP3 play­er or com­put­er. Below, you’ll find great works of fic­tion, poet­ry and non-fic­tion, by such authors as Twain, Tol­stoy, Hem­ing­way, Orwell, Von­negut, Niet­zsche, Austen, Shake­speare, Asi­mov, HG Wells & more.

Also please see our relat­ed col­lec­tion: The 150 Best Pod­casts to Enrich Your Mind. Fic­tion & Lit­er­a­ture. TipSheet_ReadCritically.pdf. Reading comprehension. Over 600 Free Audio Books for Teachers and Educators. Ten-exam-tips-for-english-reading.pdf. AQA-4705-W-TRB-U03EXTREADING.PDF. How to Find the Main Idea. Main Idea Practice Finding the main idea of a paragraph along with making an inference, finding the author's purpose, or understanding vocab words in context is one of the reading skills you'll need to master before taking the reading comprehension section on any standardized test. What is the main idea? The main idea of a paragraph is the point of the passage, minus all the details. It's the big picture - the Solar System vs. the planets.

How to Find the Main Idea Summarize the Passage After you've read the passage, summarize it in one sentence that includes the gist of ever idea from the paragraph. Look for Repetition of Ideas If you read through a paragraph and you have no idea how to summarize it because there is so much information, start looking for repeated words, phrases, ideas or similar ideas. A new hearing device uses a magnet to hold the detachable sound-processing portion in place. What idea does this paragraph consistently repeat? Avoiding Main Idea Mistakes Summary. Main Idea | Help Students Identify the Main Idea of Any Text. When teaching students about main idea, scaffold your instruction.

Students need to first learn how to identify the concrete and literal before they can determine the inferential. Here's a series of skills to slowly work through with your readers. First, help students identify key words (nouns and verbs) found within a single sentence. What is the sentence about? Then, guide students to be able to identify key words (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) in a single paragraph. What is the paragraph about? Retelling and Summarizing Lead to Main Idea Let's target the first three steps in the scaffold above. The subject of a sentence or paragraph. After reading a passage, guide the students in recalling important details (words and phrases) from the text.

After recalling, it's time to organize these thoughts. This ABC Chart Sticky Sort is a 2-step process--Students first recall important words and details from the reading (steps 1 and 2), and then they group and organize them based on big ideas. Rt/E3.4. Finding-the-Main-Idea.pdf.