Welcome to Workshop Wednesday at Pre-K Pages. Today I’m going to share some reading strategies with you and I’ve also included another free printable. This idea is from my new workshop titled Guided Reading: Building Literacy Through Small Group Instruction.
Most kindergarten programs require students to leave reading on a certain level by the end of the year. While it may seem like an impossible challenge, there are some tools and strategies you can use to make teaching young children to read a little easier- and I’m not talking about liquor or prescription meds! When students are explicitly taught reading strategies and practice using them daily with support from the teacher during guided reading lessons they are highly effective. Teaching reading strategies helps my students become confident readers more quickly, they learn what to do when they come to a word they don’t know and they don’t appeal for help every time they encounter a new word.
The strategies I use are:
- Get your mouth ready
- Look at the picture
- Stretch it out
- Look for chunks
- Jump over it
- Does it sound right?
- Ask for help
I used to have all of these strategies on a nice chart with a simple picture icon for each one. However, I quickly realized that having all the reading strategies on a chart was not the way to go with young children. I introduce the strategies one at a time, slowly, over days and weeks so when I whipped out my cool chart on the first day of guided reading and pointed to the “Get your mouth ready” picture they wanted to know what all the other pictures were for. They were distracted and quickly lost focus on what I was trying to teach them. Always one to learn from my mistakes I transferred the strategies and pictures to cards, then I hole punched them and placed them on rings. This worked much better because I could flip to the strategy I was trying to teach and show it to the students and they weren’t distracted by the other pictures. I have included a free set of printable reading strategy cards for you above.
Another unique aspect of these particular reading strategies is that they are all associated with a stuffed animal or puppet. When you first introduce the strategies to your students you can use the stuffed animals or puppets, and then place them in your guided reading area to re-visit and reinforce the concept when necessary. All of the puppets and stuffed animals in the pictures above came from Puppets at Half Price.
If you enjoyed this post please forward a link to your friends or use the buttons below to share the link on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites.
