Simple + Wild » living a simple yet wild life

est. 2017TRAVEL & STYLE

est. 2017TRAVEL & STYLE

FOLLOW ME

🚀 The Skill That Turns Readers into Thinkers M

🚀 The Skill That Turns Readers into Thinkers

More and more, the families I work with aren’t just asking about decoding—they’re asking about comprehension. Their child can read the words, but when asked “What was that about?” they struggle to explain, mix up details, or give vague responses.

So, I started intentionally incorporating summarizing into my intervention sessions—not just as an activity, but as a thinking strategy. I showed my students how to:

✔ Identify & State Main Ideas – Find the heart of the text and filter out the fluff.
✔ Analyze & Synthesize – Connect ideas and see the bigger picture.
✔ Prioritize, Order & Combine – Organize thoughts so they make sense.
✔ Compose with Precision – Paraphrase, structure, and wordsmith their way to clarity.
✔ Proofread & Edit – Refine and rethink for deeper understanding.

And the results? Suddenly, their answers to my questions weren’t surface-level—they were thoughtful, clear, and connected. Their confidence grew because they weren’t just reading; they were understanding.

💬 Try this: If comprehension is a challenge for your child or students, start small: After reading, ask them to summarize in one sentence. Can they capture the essence? Try it and let me know how it goes! 👇

🖤🧠 Xo, Kat

Me + you, why not make it official? Here’s how we can stay connected:

💌 Did you know I have a newsletter? Follow + comment “ADD ME” to hop onto my list where I share SOR tips, activities, and more!

Sentence structure isn’t just for writing—it’s the secret to better comprehension.

Here’s why: it helps students recognize how ideas are organized, how details connect, and how meaning is conveyed.

I’ve compiled some key concepts that every educator should cover in order to equip their students with the tools to decode meaning, make inferences, and engage deeply with texts—leading to stronger comprehension.

01. Fragments are incomplete thoughts. They are ok when talking, but writing requires more precision. Teaching students to recognize and revise them encourages close reading + comprehension checks.

02. Declarative/Interrogative/Imperative/Exclamatory sentences are essentially the four types found in our language, no matter the complexity. In order, they present statements of ideas, questions, advice or instruction, and a strong emotion. Teaching students the difference between them allows them to vary their sentence structuring when writing.

03. Sentence combining with conjunctions (and, but, because) strengthens fluency and logical connections. It also helps enrich their writing with extended responses containing more information.

04. Independent & dependent clauses teach students how ideas connect in linguistically complex sentences. Familiarizing students with such structuring allows them to understand them when found in text.

05. Appositives adds clarity + allows students to create more complex sentences that contain more information.

06. Sentence expansion encourages students to add details in anticipation of what a reader may need to know, and helps develop the ability to summarize.

What’s the biggest challenge your students face when working with sentence structure? Let’s troubleshoot together! 💡

Me + you, why not make it official? Here’s how we can stay connected:

💌 Did you know I have a newsletter? Follow + comment “ADD ME” to hop onto my list where I share SOR tips, activities, and more!

💖 New to morphology? Check out my morphology how-to guide on my shop highlight for more info. You are not alone, let’s do this together!

If you think ‘looking at pictures’ is just a b

If you think ‘looking at pictures’ is just a beginner reading skill… think again.

A research study done by Cobb (2017) found that students demonstrated less awareness of during-reading strategies compared to before-reading strategies, with notable developmental differences across grade levels.

Younger students often struggled to distinguish strategies specific to the reading process itself, whereas older students pulled from a metacognitive toolkit they had gradually developed to help them actively monitor and regulate their comprehension.

The frequency and sophistication of these strategies increased with grade level.

📖 Certain key points worth mentioning:

▪️Looking at pictures, for older students, translates into understanding visual aids such as graphs, tables, maps, timelines often found in expository text.

▪️Proficient readers recognized the importance of making predictions, and then checking to see if they were correct.

▪️Many 4th and 5th graders don’t actively identify main ideas and summarize while reading—yet these are two highly effective comprehension strategies!

The good news? These skills can be explicitly taught and nurtured at any stage.

I will be breaking this research study down in my newsletter this month! Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss it! ✨
🖤🧠 Xo, Kat

What during-reading strategies do you focus on with your students? Let’s discuss in the comments! ⬇️

💌 Did you know I have a newsletter? Follow + comment “ADD ME” to hop onto my list where I share SOR tips, activities, and more!

💖 New to morphology? Check out my morphology how-to guide on my shop highlight for more info. You are not alone, let’s do this together!

You didn’t expect to be here, questioning the st

You didn’t expect to be here, questioning the status quo, but now you can’t go back… 👀

At first, you just wanted to help your students become better readers but the more you learned—the more you realized something wasn’t adding up.

You started digging into the research—how kids actually learn to read—and suddenly, so much made sense.

Leveled readers? Predictable texts? Teaching kids to guess and use context clues instead of decode? 🚩 You started to see the gaps in traditional instruction and knew there had to be a better way.

Or you find that no matter how many books your child is bringing home to read, they are still struggling with each page. They don’t seem to understand what they just read and cannot summarize the information when you ask.

You find yourself on a mission to bridge that gap. You’re learning about the science of reading, questioning outdated practices, and searching for ways to teach reading in a way that actually works.

Your story is my story.

You’re not alone in this journey—and you don’t have to figure it all out by yourself.

📩 My monthly newsletter is here to give you simple, evidence-based strategies that you can start using right now. Let’s make the shift towards structured literacy together.

🖤🧠 Xo, Kat

✨Follow + comment “ADD ME” to hop onto my list. This community is one I’m so grateful to be a part of!