About 7 years ago, reading comprehension instruction became a primary focus of our staff development at our school. As part of our professional reading our Principal purchased Strategies That Work for the entire staff. The aim of comprehension instruction is to get our students to interact more completely with their reading. To help our students not only think about what they are reading but what they are learning. As a teacher with lesson plans to do, papers to correct, common formative assessments to create you might think this is just another thing to do. But when it comes to reading, comprehension is probably the most important thing. This book has been very helpful in teaching these comprehension strategies to our students. Just the Resources that Support Strategy Instruction pages at the back of the book are worth looking at. It lists Great Books and Author Sets to Launch Strategy Instruciton as well as great books for teaching content by area. I found this book so helpful I went ahead and purchased the second edition.
The second edition differs in that it has samples of student work. After all reading is connected to writing. Using these strategies with double entry journals during guided reading gives me as a teacher great insight to my students thinking, prior knowledge and weaknessess as well as strengths in writing. Both these books suggest author charts. The second edition has a section in the appendix that depicts what these charts might look like. The teachers at our school adapted these charts to fit the grade as well as English language level of our students. Each strategy has its own chart.
Because we are a dual language school these charts then had to be translated into Spanish.The wonderful dual language teachers at my school translated and or created some of these charts.
As dual language teachers we have to make instructional decisions about which strategy to present in which language. The great thing about these are that you can use one in Spanish during whole class instruction and then use the English version during a small group guided reading lesson. (I'd like to note that some of these charts were created and laminated without correcting errors such as missing accents).
At our school we have also broken these strategies down by grade level. In Kinder we focus on Visualizing Making Predictions and Connections. In first grade we review these as well as add Retelling and Inferring.
Once I started labeling I must admit I went a little crazy. I organized some of my books by author study and so of course I had to have labels for my authors. Both for the book and the bin. The pictures for the authors I got off Google and used Avery labels for the books. Not only is this helpful to my students so that they are reading just right books at their independent level but it also helps me select books for my teaching. I have baskets full of animal books, insects, people etc. 
The second edition differs in that it has samples of student work. After all reading is connected to writing. Using these strategies with double entry journals during guided reading gives me as a teacher great insight to my students thinking, prior knowledge and weaknessess as well as strengths in writing. Both these books suggest author charts. The second edition has a section in the appendix that depicts what these charts might look like. The teachers at our school adapted these charts to fit the grade as well as English language level of our students. Each strategy has its own chart.
We use guided reading as our way to differentiate reading to meet the needs of our students. One of the things we must have is a data wall showing what level each student is reading at. I've seen some creative ones in other classrooms but what I found was that in the Dual language classrooms teachers had to create two walls, one for the Spanish and one for the English. So I put on my thinking cap on and came up with this idea of how to have the level change but not have to have two data walls! I created a neighborhood including a library, school and of course homes. Each student is in a car which I purchased from Lakeshore. Then I took their pics and cut them out to fit inside the window.
Each tire shows their reading level. The red tire shows their Spanish reading level and the blue tire