Reading Strategies

During the months of September and October we have been using our Readers' Workshop lesson time to learn about reading strategies. These give students tools to solve tricky words when they come to them in their books. Our reading strategies include check the picture, think about the sounds in the word, think of what would make sense, look for word families/chunks you know, read past the puzzling word then come back and re-read the sentence, try a different pronunciation for letters (especially vowels), and break the word into smaller parts. An important part of our discussion of strategies is that we almost always use several together. We often need to check the picture, look at the sounds, think of what makes sense, etc together.

Entering November we have switched our whole group lesson focus to discussions about character, main idea, and retelling stories. Small groups (which meet after the main lesson while the class is reading independently) are still working daily on reading strategies and reading skills targeted at their individual needs.

Here are some photos of a whole group lesson when I am modeling how to use the strategy, "read past the puzzling word then go back and read the sentence again." There is also a photo of one of our classmates coming up to the document camera to show the class how he had used the same strategy in his own reading!