Reading Strategies Goal 3: Supporting Print Work AND a $75 TpT giveaway!

We have now reached week 3 of our book study of
The Reading Strategies Book Your Guide to Developing Skilled Readers.
If you haven't purchased this book yet, go grab it fast! This book is full of wonderful strategies to use with your students.  It's easy to pick up and implement new strategies right away.  I have picked up quite a few strategies to try when we return for the new school year!




If you'd like to check out Reading Strategies Goals one and two you can find them here:



Today we are going to look at Goal Three: Supporting Print Work

For students to read and be able to understand what they're reading they need to use three sources of information..  They need to be able to understand what the letters mean (does it look right?), they need to use their knowledge of language & sentence structure (does it sound right?), and they need to think about the meaning (does it make sense?). 

As educators we sometimes see students who rely on only one of the ways of gaining this information, or possibly use this information incorrectly.

I've had many students who rely completely on visual.  They painstakingly try to sound out every letter. Reading this way affects students fluency, which will affect their understanding of what they've read. Students need to be taught phonics skills and then be given the chance to use these skills by reading them in actual books.  I've seen many students in my years of teaching grow quickly and acquire skills not explicitly taught to them, just because they spend a lot of time reading.

The author gives 23 strategies under this goal to help students.  I love how she lists the strategies, gives the reading levels to use the strategies with, texts types that will work with the strategies, and the skill associated with the strategy.


Check the Picture For Help

This is a strategy probably most kindergarten and first grade teachers use consistently. The strategy is to use the pictures to help you figure out the words.  I've found this is a great help to our young readers and it is often a very simple strategy to get students to use.  For level A & B readers there are many books they'd be unable to read without a picture to help them. 
 I start out the school year doing a running record on my new first graders.  I always start with a Level A book (unless I have other knowledge that the child is already reading).  The books follow a predictable pattern.  
A cat is big. 
A dog is big.  
There are often animals in these books that students are not be able to decode the written word that names them, but with checking the picture they are able to do so.  Such as, 
A giraffe is big.   
Without a picture of a giraffe, they would most likely NOT be able to read the sentence.   The author states this strategy is an essential strategy at Levels A & B, but is also an important strategy to be used with higher reading levels along with other explicitly taught strategies.  I really like the language lesson she gives in the book.  She lays out how and what to say in walking the kids through how to look at the pictures in relation to reading.  The skill used in this strategy is integrating sources of material and it can be used with any genre or text type.



Taking the Ending Off

This next strategy teaches kids to cover up the common endings (like -ing, -ed, -er) to be able to read the first part of the word.  Then they can put back on the ending and read the whole word.
This strategy is best for students that are reading levels E- Z+.

I have used this strategy for many years with my students.  I really feel like this lesson is beneficial after you've done some lessons on word endings/suffixes.  
This year I created two new language units to use in my classroom, one on prefixes and one on suffixes.  After doing the lessons from the units I was amazed and how much my students improved in catching the prefixes and suffixes in words and were able to read the root/base word separate from them on their own.  I was one happy teacher!  
The author gives a prompt in the book,"When you get to a long word, you can sometimes take the word apart.  One way to take it apart is to take off the ending." 
This was always a difficult strategy strategy to get my kiddos to see in past years.  
The skill used with this strategy is decoding and it can be used with any genre or text type.

Here is a page from the suffix unit that I am giving to my readers.  
You can click the picture to download it.

If you are interested in either my suffix of prefix units, you can see them in my store by clicking on the pictures below or the words suffix and prefix. 




Now, on to the giveaway!

This one is a big one!  A chance to win a $75 gift certificate to TpT! 






a Rafflecopter giveaway

Post a Comment

0 Comments