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Why teach reading strategies?
Good readers use a number of different strategies as they read. Beginning readers often need help understanding what these strategies are and how to use them. Learning reading strategies will give your students tools they can use to improve their ability to understand what they read.
| Reading Strategies Overview | You'll find information here about the various reading strategies you can teach |
| Icons | You'll find information here about how to use the icons you'll find in Literacy Explorer. |
Pre-reading Strategies
Taking a few minutes to get your students ready to read can help make the reading session more meaningful for them.
Here are some suggestions that may help:
- Set a purpose for reading --- Many students begin reading without knowing why they are reading or what they expect to find out. Teach your students set a purpose for reading. This can help them improve their ability to understand and remember what they read.
- Preview the text --- Teach your students to read titles, headings and subheadings, look at pictures and text summaries, and read story-related questions. (Our Story Preview and Picture Walk activities will help you do all this.)
- Make predictions --- Teach your students to think about the material they are going to read and to make predictions about what they think will happen next. This will help generate interest in the reading material.
- Preview Vocabulary --- Teach your students to look for new words. As you and your student move through the Picture Walk, you'll notice that some of the words in the text have been highlighted. Taking a few minutes to help your students become familiar with these words will help make the reading session easier.
- Activate prior knowledge --- Teach your students to think about what they already know about the topic and to relate new information to what they already know. This will help build interest in the story and increase comprehension.
Help your student understand how to use active reading strategies.
Here are some suggestions that might help:
- Ask questions --- Teach your students to ask questions about the text as they read. (You'll find questions in all of the Literacy Explorer stories to help with this process.)
- Make predictions --- Teach your students to think about the events of the story and try to guess what might happen next. This will help keep your students engaged in reading the story.
Post-Reading Strategies
After you and your students have finished reading a story, you can choose to try out some of our skill builder activities. These activities are designed to reinforce the learning that has taken place during the reading. They will also help your students develop specific reading skills.
- Phonics (Sounding words out)
- Write to Read (Using writing to improve comprehension)
- Fluency (Reading smoothly and easily with expression)
- Vocabulary (Expanding vocabulary)
- Comprehension (Improving understanding)
- At the top of each page of a story in Literacy Explorer, you'll find a set of icons. Each icon is designed to serve as a prompt to help remind you and your students of the strategies you can use when you run into difficulty.
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All of the icons are listed below. Take a few minutes to become familiar with them and with the strategies they represent.
| Look closer: Teach your students to look at pictures, titles, headings, sub-headings, etc. Help your students learn to use visual clues to unlock the meaning of new words. | |
| Think about it: Teach your students to think about what they've said and to decide whether or not it makes sense. Help them to think about what's happening in the story. | |
| Look back: Teach your students to go back to the beginning of the sentence or the passage and try reading it again. | |
| Sound it out: Teach your students to use phonics skills to try and sound out new words. Ask them to think about the letter/s that the new word begins or ends with, to think about what those letters sound like, to see if they can find any smaller words within the words, and so on. | |
| Make a guess: Teach your students to look for clues that will help them guess the meaning of words they don't recognize. | |
| Good job!: Remember to use positive feedback and to be very specific about what it is that your students have done right! | |
| Take a break: Reading is hard work! Remember to take breaks frequently. |
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