All over Pinterest, Instagram, and TikTok - there are thousands of classrooms and reading intervention rooms that look like they are straight out of a magazine.

It’s easy to scroll through these pictures/videos and feel like your room needs to look like the inside of the Container Store. While there is something to be said about being in an organized space that brings you joy, our end goal is tying beauty with functionality.

In this blog, we’re sharing how you can optimize your wall space to support your students’ literacy development. Keep reading to learn more!

Graphic organizers are visual displays and incredible tools to help your students with writing and comprehension. Graphic organizers can also be called mind maps, concept maps, or concept webs, but they all have the same wonderful purpose - to solidify comprehension. Graphic organizers explicitly teach students how to connect and organize information. They visually show what information to prioritize as well as help students with brainstorming and connecting any background information.

Today, we’re diving right into a pretty loaded topic! We wanted to start the conversation around what students need in order to effectively comprehend lessons in the classroom and what they need to be able to write effectively to demonstrate their knowledge.

Now obviously, this isn’t something we can fully communicate/solve in a single blog post. But … we do have a really good starting point! And, don’t worry, we also have some really good follow-up coming your way!

We are wrapping up the 5 Core Components of Literacy this week with the final component, arguably the most important component, comprehension!

The end goal of reading is obviously…

Reading Comprehension

So how do we make sure that students are able to effectively comprehend what they read?

There are a variety of reasons why students struggle to develop reading and writing skills, and many of these students need explicit instruction in foundational skills such as phonics for decoding and spelling, automatic fluent reading skills, and basic text structures.