Reading Strategies

Students have been working hard on learning about and practicing reading strategies--what to do when they are stuck on a word in reading. Asking for help is a last resort--students are developing a toolbox of strategies to help them solve a word without help. We are using a strategy cue card with animal characters to help remember the strategies. So far, students have learned about "Eagle Eye" (check the picture), "Stretchy Snake" (stretch the sounds in the word), "Fishy Lips" (get your mouth ready for the first sound of the word), "Froggy Hop" (skip the hard word, read past it, then think what would make sense/look right/sound right), and "Chunky Monkey" (find a part of the word--a chunk--that you can use to figure out the rest of the word). We still have a few strategies to go, and students have already noticed that we sometimes need to try more than one strategy when stuck on a word. Watch for a new reading strategy bookmark in your child's reading folder next time he/she brings a book home to read. 

These students are demonstrating how they used the "Froggy Hop" strategy to figure out an unknown word. The document camera and interactive whiteboard are great teaching/learning tools! Students put pages of their reading books under the document camera to display the pages on the interactive whiteboard. It was great!