I found this article to be very interesting.  In the article it discusses different strategies when participating in shared reading.  One thing is comprehension.  The article talked about breaking the reading into pages or sections and asking questions about each section to establish comprehension throughout the story. Asking review questions about what just happened, or prediction questions about what might happen next, or come next, all are great ways to help students comprehend what they are reading.  In relation to the Pirate article on NationalGeographic, this article is broken up into sections which makes it great to work with for the comprehension level.

Next the article talks about vocabulary and introducing new vocabulary words that appear in the readings to students.  But this is never an opportunity to tell students what the word means, but the perfect opportunity to have them use context clues to figure it out.  This requires thinking and challenges the students.  In the pirate article, there are many terms that will probably be new to students when they are learning about the different aspects of a pirate’s life.  Not only will the students be learning new things about pirates, but they will be expanding their vocabulary. When learning this new vocabulary students will be challenged to use context clues which will help to sharpen their context clue abilities, which is another important part of reading.

Text Structure is that way in which a passage is written.  There are many different forms of text structure and covering them all with students is important.  For the pirate article, I found it to be mostly descriptive as it described Black Beard and the terror that he was.

Finally we have text features.  Each text consist of  many different features and its the students responsibility to know what those features are and where to find them.  Text features including headings, illustrations, bold or italicized words, and any extra features like a glossary or index.  These resources can be very helpful to a reader if they understand what they are.  In the pirate article, there are many illustrations and bolded words to draw the reader’s attention while reading.