Reading Strategies

Hi Fellow Teachers!

I hear you've been learning about reading strategies this week and have begun incorporating them into your lessons! I LOVE READING STRATEGIES.  We use these strategies ALL the time as adults (in fact, we use multiple strategies at a time), but sometimes they are hard to break down for our kiddos.  If we keep the end in mind...we want our students to use all these strategies in one text, just like we would do. So to get them there...YOU'VE GOT TO BREAK IT DOWN ONE AT A TIME.  So...start with one. Practice it. Then, add on.  As students begin to practice these reading strategies and become familiar with the academic vocabulary, you can model using multiple strategies in your read-alouds and think-alouds. :)

For my students, I made this reading wall (see picture) that is in my classroom library.  I actually cover it up in the beginning of the year and make it a big deal when I "reveal" it.  (It's actually blank with the thought bubbles and the words "Good readers STOP and THINK to..."  The point of the mystery is to get them invested in wanting to be good readers by talking about why we read, what we can read, and what not.  Then, I incorporate a reading strategy with the majority of my read-alouds and objectives.  I start with making text-self connections because this is what invests us in reading more than anything.  (Plug for lower elementary: it's okay to not even start with a strategy, you can start with "good readers stop and think to notice things..." and get your kids to just start noticing details, pictures, etc. since they are all new readers!) Okay moving on.. After teaching T-S connections, I usually move on to questioning because students are naturally curious (and it connects with tons of standards).  I add to the thinking clouds through out the year one-by-one so that students aren't overwhelmed, and so that they learn to reference it. 

With each strategy, I also teach a hand motion so that as students listen to my read-alouds, they can just use the hand signals to show me that they are thinking about what we are reading.  Eventually students will use multiple hand signals (which is the goal!)   Just like Ashley C. said about objectives during our lesson planning clinic...we don't want to make it a mystery what kids are supposed to learn.  I've found that these posters help me to explicitly teach the strategies so that my students truly know what good readers do.   AND they help give my EL students (and all students, really) sentence frames to communicate their thinking as they read and use the strategies.


I hope this gets you pumped about teaching your students READING STRATEGIES! :)  It's the BEST when your kids tell you that they made connections or made an inference during independent reading! :)