Reading Activities for Distance Learning

Reading activities for distance learning should be more than just glowing worksheets! In fact, distance learning offers us some fascinating affordances in terms of what kinds of activities we can create for our learners.

Read along activities

Having students read along with a text can be a great way to build automaticity with new texts. In this reading selection, I have chunked the text so that students can pause to read along.  This kind of shared reading would also work well for distance tutoring sessions.



A printable version of this reading selection can be found here.

Adding videos to reading selections

Sometimes a short video can do wonders for building background knowledge. When I create digital reading activities, I like to add links to short videos. For example, in this text about oysters and the Chesapeake, I added a time lapse of oysters feeding. This visual imagery helps readers to visualize the way that oysters filter water--a key idea in the text that they are reading.

Questions on the same page as the reading selection

For students who aren't used to working digitally, managing multiple tabs can add an extra layer of difficulty. Putting questions and activities on the same page as a set of Google Slides can make it easier to go back to the text.

I'm working on making some digital reading activities. Many of them will be free until June 30. Feel free to try one out! And if you do...leave a message to let me know how it worked out!

Monarch Life Cycle: Distance Learning
Informational Text for Distance Learning: Oysters and the Chesapeake
Tulips Through Time: Paired Passages for Distance Learning
Groundwater: Resources for Google Classroom
Weather Sayings: Paired Passages for Google Classroom