ABSTRACT
Supporting students and teaching them to approach complex thinking with more confidence and grit will allow all students to access rigorous curriculum. Students often need assistance with reading text. A Guide-O-Rama guides the students through an assigned text, providing support so they can read and learn at more rigorous levels. Students must have mentor texts to study and deconstruct as they begin to build knowledge of style and format of a particular mode of writing. A semantic feature analysis also creates a visual for students trying to synthesize information from multiple texts. Aside from graphic organizers, there are other ways to make reading and writing more visual for our students. Core extensions are designed to extend the learning time of the core content by giving students more time to learn the core curriculum. Many students who receive additional or clarifying instruction on content may start to develop a dependency on that support.
