Sit your students in a circle at one side of the room and place a toy crystal ball in the center of the circle. Dress up like a fortune teller and read a book to them. Stop every few minutes and ask a child to predict what will happen next. Have him wave his hands over the crystal ball and make his predictions. Prediction is a powerful reading strategy, according to the Reading A-Z website. Children must use clues in the context of the story to guess what will happen next. This will help propel them to read more. Encourage them to use this activity while reading on their own.
Print out worksheets with several short sentences or paragraphs printed on them. Label these paragraphs alphabetically, with the first paragraph being "A," the second being "B" and so on. These paragraphs and sentences should be a story that has been mixed up out of order. Students must read through the paragraphs and rearrange them in the proper order. They should write the correct order of the paragraphs by writing the letters down on a line at the bottom of the sheet. Read the story out loud with them after they are done to see how well they did.
Tell your students that they have the ability to "close up" or "zoom in" on the text. Put up a piece of text on the blackboard or overhead projector and read through it with them. Get to a part of the text that is difficult for you and them to understand. Tell them it's time to "close up" on the text. Reread the sentence with them and find the part of the sentence that is hard to figure out. This could be a word or a reference to something earlier in the paragraph. Tell them it's okay to get out the dictionary if they don't know a word. Look up the word with them and define it. Read back through the paragraph to find the information they may have missed during the first read-through.
Teach your students that every time they read, they should have a purpose for reading. Hand out worksheets with several blank lines that provide room for a book name, a "Purpose" section and a "Success" section. Every time students read, they should fill out the name of the book or story they are going to read. They should then fill put the "Purpose" section. Tell them purposes can range from "Just for fun" to "School work" and even "Personal learning." After they finish reading they should fill out the "Success" section with a few simple phrases, such as "This book was a lot of fun!" or "I learned about the Civil War" to help indicate what they took away from the book.