By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed. Annotating and note-taking are both school skills (and work skills!) that allow you to get more from the text you’re reading. But like with any skill, you need to know how and when to use it. In this blog post, I …
How to Read Books When You Don’t Like Reading
By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed. It’s no secret that books contain some of the most valuable information in the world. From Greek mythology to religious texts, and diaries (Anne Frank!) to textbooks, our world relies on books to pass information to the next generation. If you …
How to Not Fall Asleep When Reading: 9 Tips for Students
By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed. We’ve all been there. We’ve all saved our reading homework until the end of the day because we had to do the “real” homework first, but then we start falling asleep after just a few pages. Why does reading do this …
What to highlight when annotating novels
By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed. There seems to be endless confusion around annotation techniques. “What do I highlight?” is one of the most common skill-based questions I’m asked, and so this blog post teaches you what to highlight when annotating novels. In a future blog post, …
How to read hard books: 7 strategies for difficult text
By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed. If you’re a student of any age, you’re going to read hard books for school. This is a fact of life. But whether you consider yourself a good reader or not, reading hard books will always take more effort and sometimes …
How to get through a book you don’t like: 8 strategies
By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed. Sometimes we have to read books we don’t like. Such is life. This post has eight strategies for how to get through required readings that you’re just not loving. Quick little PSA: If you’re reading a book for personal enjoyment and …
How to study for a test on a book
By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed. From middle school through graduate school, being tested on what we read basically is school. Read a book, and then take a test: repeat forever. Therefore, knowing how to study for a test on a book is the key to doing …
How to write a summary of a text: 6 tips for summarizing
By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed. Knowing how to write a summary of a text is one of the most important skills for school and work. It’s even important outside of school, like in everyday conversations with people (Hey, what was that movie about? How’s that book …
12 summer reading tips for middle school and high school students
By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed. Required summer reading often involves the same challenging books as school-year reading, but without all the teacher support and guidance along the way. For this reason, some middle and high school students who succeed with school-year reading will struggle to independently …
How to get your child to read when they don’t want to: 3 tips for parents
By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed. Not every child (or adult!) likes to read. Does that bum me out? Yep. But similarly, not everyone likes to swim or cook or watch scary movies. The challenge for many parents is when a child doesn’t want to read when …