National Humor Month was created in April 1976 to bring public awareness to the therapeutic value of humor. Scientific research shows that when we laugh, we reduce stress and pain, build up our immune systems and recharge our bodies. From a literacy perspective, reading humor helps to build strategic comprehension! Humor requires inference: combining what we read or see with what we already know.

Read more about National Humor Month here.

10 WAYS TO CELEBRATE NATIONAL HUMOR MONTH IN THE CLASSROOM

1.  Read funny books. Start with HIP’s ONE CRAZY NIGHT and WINNER – both stories with ensemble casts of kooky characters, like a sitcom! And don’t forget the BATS MYSTERY SERIES, 6 novels that put funny characters in exciting situations.

2.   Read funny poems. April is also National Poetry Month, so dust off your Shel Silverstein, Jack Prelutsky, Dennis Lee collections for some funny poems. And discover some new poets for kids, such as Amy Ludwig VanDerwater and Ken Nesbitt.

3. Start every day with a word play riddle for the students to figure out. (What do you call a can opener that doesn’t work? A can’t opener!)

4.  Have students rehearse and tell a (teacher-approved) joke. This is a great fluency-building activity.

5. Brainstorm words that mean the same as laugh or funny. Here’s a start: chortle, guffaw, snort, giggle, roar.

6.  Encourage students to use some of these words in a personal narrative piece on “I laughed my head off when…”.

7.  Sing some silly songs. (Remember “The Name Game“?…Shirley, Shirley, Bo Birley…)

8.  Collect some funny memes about current events.

9. Practice drawing inferences from cartoons. (Take time to talk about what background knowledge is needed to understand and appreciate various cartoons.)

10.  Provide students with a comic strip with the last frame removed for them to write and illustrate a humourous ending.

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It’s been said that the Sports Section has the highest readability of any section of the Newspaper!

I can believe it, for two reasons: People and Jargon. People’s names are notoriously difficult to read as they are rarely decodable. Sports terminology might be easy to decode but is often hard to understand. Here’s the thing, however. Most people who choose to read the sports section already have the background knowledge to pronounce Novak Djokovic or to understand what a hat trick is.

One classic study by Donna Recht and Lauren Leslie used a passage about baseball to examine the effects of prior knowledge on reading comprehension. They found that overall reading ability had less impact than background knowledge. The “struggling readers” who knew a lot about baseball could understand and replicate the test passage better than the “good readers” who had little background knowledge about the sport.

Prior knowledge about a topic is the strongest predictor of whether a reader will understand reading related to that topic. However, the surprising thing is the extent to which background knowledge influences other reading behaviours, such as problem-solving when meaning breaks down. In fact, we at HIP call it “The Glue that Makes Learning Stick.”

Taking time to build background knowledge is one way that teachers can support students in comprehending text. That’s why all HIP TEACHER’S GUIDES include a short one-page article on a complementary topic to activate background knowledge and build engagement. And let students read the Sports Section now and then. It might be just what they need!

Your sports fans will enjoy reading FOUL SHOT and CATCHING AIR, two novels that are more than just sports stories.

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