There are two things that are imperative to student's understand of reading. Those are the two that we don't spend the time to do adequately. The first of these is to have students make text-to-self connections (activating background knowledge). I have used this activity over and over with students. With my kinder students we do it before each story...like I really have a chance in their not telling me things about themselves! lol This has also been used with low level readers at the secondary level and the ELL student. Very good results on test scores after students have learned how to do this automatically when they read!