Read-alouds expose students to a variety of texts in different genres. During an interactive read-aloud, teachers pause strategically while reading in order to invite students to make comments, ask questions, or make predictions. Read-alouds allow teachers to model fluent reading and demonstrate reading strategies.

The Logbooks and Travelers’ Journals on the Reach the World website make excellent read-alouds because of their unique combination of content and narrative form. Each Journal and Logbook is a self-contained document and can be used to model important reading comprehension strategies, including:

• Questioning
• Inferring
• Text-to-Self Connections
• Predicting
• Visualizing
• Text-to-World Connections
  

The Logbooks are updated weekly on Friday evening and they follow a template, so the type of information is the same every week. Each traveler writes two Journals per month; new Journals are uploaded every week on Friday evening.

Mini-lessons allow teachers to model and provide instruction on important reading comprehension strategies and skills using authentic texts in a variety of genres.

Reach the World’s Field Notes, Logbooks, Journals, and Travelers’ Bios provide narrative, reflective, and informational texts that can be used to model comprehension strategies. Possible mini-lessons include:

• Reading unfamiliar informational texts to collect and interpret data, facts and ideas
• Creating sensory images from words
• Making and confirming predictions
• Finding important information in a text
• Summarizing the important information in a text
• Identifying and interpreting facts from captions, maps, graphs, charts, and other visuals
• Distinguishing between fact and opinion
• Making connections with personal experiences
• Identifying the main idea of a passage
• Identifying the author’s purpose
• Identifying a sequence of events
• Using context clues to figure out unknown vocabulary

Independent reading allows students to practice the skills and strategies that have been taught during the mini-lesson, using their own independent text. Texts are usually selected by the students themselves and should be at a comfortable reading level for them. There are several ways to incorporate Reach the World into independent reading:

• Set up a Reach the World reading center around the classroom computers or at a table with printouts. Here, students can read the Logbook, Travelers’ Bios, Journals, and Field Notes; complete vocabulary activities; answer comprehension questions; or practice specified reading skills.
• Have students read their favorite travelers’ Journals weekly and respond in their own reading response journal.
• Assign one student, or a group of students, to read the Logbook weekly and write a summary to report to the class.
• Have students write book reviews to share with the travelers.
  

During Writing Workshop, students plan, draft, revise, and edit writing on self-selected topics. Throughout the year, students produce writing in a variety of genres, including personal narratives, essays, editorials, fiction, poetry, expository (how-to) writing, responses to literature, and informational reports.

Reach the World’s Field Notes, Journals, Travelers Biographies, and Logbooks can function as mentor texts for student writing in several different genres, including:

• Stories (fiction or autobiographical)
• Diary/Journal
• Personal Narrative
• Informational essays/brochures
• Descriptive Writing
• Persuasive Writing

Reach the World’s high-interest content also sparks students’ imagination for creative writing projects such as poetry, adventure short stories, or folktales. Following are some examples of Reach the World student work.