eBook tools and features encourage student interaction with text. They strengthen student growth in key reading skills; support a close reading of each text; help students focus on the key or essential understandings; and give students the tools to practice and demonstrate critical-thinking skills that are necessary to meet 21st-century skills and meet state and national literacy standards.
Books on Learning A-Z websites come with our eBook features. Here are some ways you can use the features with your students to help them be active, independent readers.
The interactive features are easily found in each Read version of a book. Students can access these tools and features to help build skills at any time. Before asking students to use the tools and features, model the skills you want the students to practice.
Recording features allow students to record themselves reading and play back the recordings to hear their own fluency. Students will need a computer or device with a working microphone. Students can record, paise, and play back their recordings and send these recordings to your In Basket as an informal fluency check.
Draw, highlight, and stamp tools make it easy for students to circle, underline, highlight, or stamp parts of the text or text features to practice a variety of reading skills.
For example, students can underline a word they don’t known along with the context to help them define it. Students can highlight details to show how things are alike or how they are different, or students can highlight to cite evidence when answering quiz questions after reading.
Students can also use the various stamps for skill practice. Skill practice can include stamping a star on the main character of a story or stamping a question mark next to a section that sparks a question not answered right there in the text.
Notes lets students use their own words to ask questions about what they’re reading, or write the main idea or a quick summary of a section.
The eJournal helps students keep track of new words as they read, as well as reflect on what they just read. Students add a word by typing the word and as much information about the word as they can, starting with their own definition and context sentence. Students write reflections in their eJournal to connect what they’re reading to another text, state quick opinions, or respond in another way to the text.
Individual words within a text also offer students a menu of options that provide additional phonics, fluency, and vocabulary support. Students click on a word and might see the options to hear the word spoken aloud, highlight it, add it to their Word Journal where they can explore the word’s meaning all on their own, or view the Vocabulary Card, which offers details to strengthen student understanding of a word’s meaning.
Teaching students how to use the eBook features gives them the tools they need to identify and understand the key ideas in each book through reading closely and thinking critically.
eBbook tools and features provide a fun and engaging interactive experience for you and your student’s to meet today’s literacy standards.
