Just like a detective following the clues that will lead to the perpetrator of the crime, you, my friend, must use the clues hidden in the
text of a reading passage in order to determine the meaning of difficult vocabulary words.
Nancy Wildt, the school's literacy tutor, spends the day handing out worksheets
full of reading passages with blanks in them, having students answer open - ended questions and timing students as they read paragraphs out loud, marking down mistakes.
That's inherently fairer than the current state assessment regime, in which the
topics of reading passages are a complete mystery, thereby privileging the children with the broadest background knowledge.
Here's an example of just one paragraph from one
of the reading passages Wattenberg analyzed, with the words she identified as challenging replaced by a nonsense word, blunk.
Or, you can blend in movement with learning, e.g. hand clapping or finger snapping along with the recitation of multiplication tables or at the
end of a reading passage.
Teachers may also try to predict what will be on a reading test, but because there's no way to predict the
content of the reading passages, they can only focus on skills.