1. 7 Habits of Proficient Readers

2. Activate Schema Students make connections to what they read from their own experience or memories. This helps them become active in the process of understanding a book and enjoying it.

3. Ways to Make Connections Text-to-Self Text-to-Text Text-to-World

4. Visualize Readers form mental images of characters and places as they read. These images aid in the ability to connect people to places and to ideas.

5. Question Readers ask themselves questions about the story and characters. They ask about a character's motivations and reactions to the story events. As they read, they write their questions and their own reactions in a notebook or reading journal to refer to as needed.

6. Determine Importance Students learn how to judge which ideas are most important in what they're reading. This determination aids in understanding the content and the story. They continue making notes in their reading journal, an important form of repetition that allows the reader to think about what is most important.

7. Make Inferences Students use clues from the text as well as their own experiences to make inferences and draw conclusions about the text they are reading. In this way, students engage in a conversation with the book or story, finding meaning in the text.

8. Synthesize Synthesizing is the process of putting all the pieces of the puzzle together to make the whole. Also known as assimilation, synthesizing represents a reader's complete engagement and growing understanding of a book or story.

9. Monitor for Meaning Students will summarize a small selection in as few words as possible. Students will break longer selections into smaller parts and summarize as they read.