Reading Strategies?!? What are those?!?

I’m sure that you opened your child’s homework folder today and thought ‘So… I got all of these papers, now what do they mean?!?’ In your child’s homework folder today, you should find several papers that will be very useful in helping your child with reading. I will take a little while to explain one of those important papers.

The first paper lists each of our reading strategies. What is a reading strategy, you may ask? In the simplest terms, a reading strategy is a tool that can be used to determine a word or phrase during reading. We tell our students that they each have a ‘tool box’ for reading and each of our reading strategies is a tool that they can pull out of their tool box when they are having trouble with a book.

Here are the strategies that your child should be using each time he/she is reading:
*Point to the words (make sure your finger is pointing to the word you are reading)
*Look at the pictures (if you get to a word that you don’t know, look at the pictures for a clue… but only guessing won’t work! Make sure to use other strategies to check if the word works!)
*Stretch out the word (say each sound slowly and snap it back together to read the word)
*Get our mouth ready (get your mouth ready to say the beginning sound in the word)
*Does it make sense? (ask yourself if the word you picked make sense in the sentence… if it sounds silly it might not be the correct word)
*Skip it and read on (if you still can’t figure it out, skip the word and come back to it later)
*Try it again (if the first time doesn’t sound right, try it again until it works)
*Look for the smaller words in the word (look for chunks that you know, for example ‘that’ or ‘catch’)
*Look for word families (rhyming word families all have the same ending but change the beginning sound)
*Try both vowel sounds (if the short vowel doesn’t work, try the long vowel sound)
*Self-correct (if you realize the word you said wasn’t right, go back and read it again with the correct word)
*Look for blends and endings (look for combinations of letters that you know)

As you can see, your child has many tools in their reading tool box. Please make sure to encourage your child to use these tools each and every time he/she reads to you!