Reading Strategies
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Reading Strategies
- STRATEGIES- are plans or ways of doing things-in the case of developing readers and writers, they are ways of figuring out unknown words or thinking about the text.
- Some Meaning based strategies that your child can try when stuck:
o Using picture clues to think about what makes sense
o Re-read to think about what makes sense
o Pausing to think about what makes sense
o Reading ahead to think about what makes sense
- Some Visual Information strategies that your child might try when stuck:
o Using the beginning letter sound to get themselves started
o Looking for a known part inside the word (eg. Yesterday)
o Thinking of another work that looks like the tricky one (shook®look;land®and)
o Try to break the word into chunks (af/ter, un/der, to/day)
- Remember that while we have a lot of strategies to use, not every strategy will work for every word! Sometimes your child may need to try more than one strategy on a particular word!
- When you are reading with your child have a conversation with them about what they are reading. If they get stuck, these prompts may help remind them of what they can try:
o “What can you do to figure that out?
o “Does that make sense?”
o “What do you notice about that [word,letter,picture, etc]?
o “What do you think it could be?”
- Don’t let the silence of wait time make you anxious! Sometimes kids need time to figure things out.
- If your child is really stuck, it is OK to tell them a word so that they can keep moving! We want to preserve the meaning of what they’re reading and above all, for it to be FUN!