Strategies That Work: Teaching Comprehension to Enhance Understanding [Paperback]

Stephanie Harvey (Author), Anne Goudvis (Author), Donald Graves (Foreword)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1571103104 | ISBN-13: 978-1571103109 | Publication Date: February 2000

"We wrote this book to grapple with that jungle gym of thoughts, words,m and ideas that make up reading. We are insatiably inter ested in kids' thinking."

Product Details

• Paperback: 328 pages
• Publisher: Stenhouse Publishers (February 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1571103104
• ISBN-13: 978-1571103109
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #44,638 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Stephanie Harvey has spent the past thirty five years teaching and learning about reading and writing as an elementary teacher, special ed teacher and staff developer. She currently serves as a literacy consultant to schools and districts throughout the country. Her books include Strategies That Work, Comprehension and Collaboration, and Nonfiction Matters. Additionally, she creates videos and curricular resources for teachers and kids in grades K-12. Insatiably curious about children's thinking, Steph is a teacher first and foremost and works in schools on a regular basis savoring any time spent with kids. She has two grown children and lives in Denver with her husband, escaping to the high country whenever possible to breathe that fresh mountain air.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

247 of 250 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars These strategies empower students to improve comprehension., June 28, 2001

By 

Rocco B. Rubino "Rocco R." (Ohio) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Strategies That Work: Teaching Comprehension to Enhance Understanding (Paperback)

At first glance, it is easy to be a bit cynical when you see a book entitled "Strategies That Work," especially when it deals with the subject of teaching students to read. I have to admit I was, until I started reading this book and putting into practice Harvey and Goudvis' common-sense strategies for empowering students to make meaning from what they have read.

So many of our children can decode, and are as fluent as we are, yet when it comes to comprehension, inferencing, and extending meaning, they are completely lost. Not any more; Strategies at Work to the rescue!

There isn't enough room to review all of my favorite strategies, but I will offer one; for me, Chapter 8, which deals with Visualizing and Inferring is worth the price of the book.

The authors walk you through how to get students to visualize, or as they so elequently put it "make movies in your mind," as a way of establishing connections with text in order to improve comprehension. In the section entitled "Inferential Thinking: Reading Between the Lines," teachers are given strategies to model and help students think more abstractly in order to extend meaning, which is a skill that many of the state standardized tests are requiring our students to do.

"Strategies that Work" is one of the few books I have read that actually deliver on what they promise. Recommended for teachers K-12.

358 of 367 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must-Read for All Reading Teachers, April 6, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Strategies That Work: Teaching Comprehension to Enhance Understanding (Paperback)

If you really would like to know HOW to teach reading comprehension, this book is for you! Steph and Anne pick up where Ellin Keene's Mosaic of Thought left off. This book tells how to teach kids to think while reading (through think-alouds) and gives many minilessons for teaching comprehension. Besides the great lessons and tips, there are numerous resources listing picture books to use for teaching each of the seven comprehension strategies discussed first in Mosaic and now in this great book. I've already tried many ideas in Strategies That Work and have had tremendous success with them. I highly recommend this book!

135 of 138 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Teaching reading comprehension---must have this book, December 30, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Strategies That Work: Teaching Comprehension to Enhance Understanding (Paperback)

After 20+ years in regular classroom and special education teaching, this is a book that brings new strategies to expand the thinking of the teacher and the students. I love to read and want to have my students both comprehend and think at a deep level and love to read. My current teaching assignment is a 4th/5th grade classroom. This book has 40 strategy lessons for understanding texts that can be adapted to hundreds of books and expand your teaching. There is an extensive, user friendly, list of favorite books for introducing and guiding practice in a given strategy. This is especially helpful to teachers from 2nd to 8th grade including Science, Social Studies or Language Arts teachers at middle school level.There are ways to use short text to better comprehend text in social studies, science and other content areas. There are examples of student work, illustrations, scripts of conversations, selection of response options for students to demonstrate their use of strategies, and mini lessons that are adaptable to many books and resources that you currenly use but could teach in a more proficient way. This book joins a short collection of my favorites-Brian Cambourne's book on retelling, Lucy Calkin's Art of Teaching Writing, Mosaic of Thought, and a book on classroom community.