Welcome to EduTips, a side project of the Cult of Pedagogy podcast where I share one quick idea to make your teaching better.

This is Jennifer Gonzalez and I am your host.

This EduTip is sponsored by EduLastic.

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Today's EduTip is do a smooth first read.

Sometimes you'll find yourself in a teaching situation where you need to read something out loud to students.

It might be a story, an article, a passage, a letter, etc.

And it'll be something that contains places that you know you'll need to discuss, explain, or elaborate on something.

These interruptions might be necessary and even desirable when doing a deep dive into a text,

but they can really mess up a listener's experience of the text.

So the next time you have something like this in your lesson plan, do a smooth first read of the text before dissecting, analyzing, or explaining it.

Let students know in advance that you won't be stopping the first time, but that you'll go back later to answer questions and discuss some important parts.

The first read is to just get a feel for the overall text.

This tip comes from literacy expert Angela Perry, who wrote an article for us on strategies for building student vocabulary.

We also talked about these strategies in episode 182 of the podcast.

In the article, she describes a strategy where students study a few carefully selected words from a text, but before they do that, they just listen to the text.

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