Reading Strategies
Strategies for Readers
Why should my child read aloud?
Try these ideas at home to help increase your child's success in reading.
Most importantly, read to your children often!
Read about topics of interest to them. Explore reading through stories, informational books, recipes, letters or emails from grandparents, and as many other options as you can create. When reading books, stop to discuss what you just read. Discuss how the text makes you feel or what else it makes you think of. Discuss important characters and events. Talk about the title, illustrations, rhyming words, and other phonics patterns. Share how you use what you read for enjoyment, to cook something, to learn something, or to relax--the possibilities are endless. Children will learn what they see modeled.
Echo Reading
How do I use it?
Read a sentence or a paragraph as your child uses a finger to follow under the words. The student echoes back the same sentence or paragraph following along with their finger to be sure the student is actually reading, rather than simply copying what you are saying.
What does it do?
Children can practice phrasing and expression while developing their oral reading fluency. The guided practice and support of the echo reading helps readers to become confident in developing basic reading skills.
Repeated Reading
How do I use it?
Select stories that are approximately 50-100 words long and fairly easy at first. Read the selection with the child the first time for comprehension. Then, children can then concentrate on reading more quickly. Emphasize the reading speed. Ask the children to read along with a fluent reader. Give children a goal for time. Ask the readers to read the same passage alone until they are able to read it in the goal time. After children reach their goal, choose another story.
What does it do?
The goal is to improve fluency so that reading comprehension can become the core focus as basic reading skills improve.
Choral or Paired Reading
How do I use it?
Read out loud together with a whole group of children. After hearing the teacher read and discuss a selection, children reread the text together. At home, students can do a paired reading in sync with a parent or older sibling.
What does it do?
This strategy helps students who may feel self-conscious or nervous about reading aloud in front of others. Reading along with more fluent readers aids struggling readers in becoming successful. Students begin to internalize fluent reading and transfer this skill across other texts and passages.
Critical Strategies
The strategies described below are critical in developing readers' abilities to learn from text.
Inferencing: Using information they find in the text and prior knowledge, children construct meaning and draw conclusions.
Predicting: Based on understanding of text so far, children make a guess about what is to come and revise or confirm predictions.
Identifying important information: Children identify important facts and details. Good readers use text structures to aid in their understanding. [Click on the file at the bottom of the page to learn more about text structures.]
Monitoring: Children learn to adjust their speed and fix problems they identify as they read.
Summarizing: After reading longer passages of text, children identify and restate important information using their own words.
Questioning: Children ask themselves questions that they want answered while reading. Children revise and question continuously.
Braunger, J., & Lewis, J. P. (2006). Building a knowledge base in reading. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.