Strategies & Materials for Teachers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Early Childhood

 

Explanation: The repeated reading strategy is designed for students to be able to feel confident while reading. Its main goal is to help children be able to read accurately, effortlessly and at an appropriate rate.

 

Strategy Plans:

Materials: Reading book, stop watch (if readings are to be timed)

Preparation: The teacher, parent, adult tutor, or peer tutor working with the student should be trained in advance to use the listening passage preview approach.

Steps in Implementing This Intervention:

• Step 1: Sit with the student in a quiet location without too many distractions. Position the book selected for the reading session so that both you and the student can easily follow the text.

• Step 2:  Select a passage in the book of about 100 to 200 words in length.

• Step 3:  Have the student read the passage through. (Unless you have a preference, the student should be offered the choice of reading the passage aloud or silently.)

• Step 4:  If the student is reading aloud and misreads a word or hesitates for longer than 5 seconds, read the word aloud and have the student repeat the word correctly before continuing through the passage. If the student asks for help with any word, read the word aloud. If the student requests a word definition, give the definition.

• Step 5:  When the student has completed the passage, have him or her read the passage again. You can choose to have the student read the passage repeatedly until either the student has read the passage a total of 4 times or the student reads the passage at the rate of at least 85 to 100 words per minute.

Tips: Repeated reading is effective as an intervention to build student reading fluency because it gives the student lots of reading practice. However, this activity could become dull and uninteresting for the student over time. If you find that the student is beginning to lose interest in repeated reading, consider:

• Providing praise to the student in specific terms for good reading.

• Allowing the student to pick out high-interest books or articles to use for repeated reading.

• Using a stop-watch, monitor the student's reading rate during each repeated reading and chart the results on a graph.

Rationale: Instructional methodologies have been developed that are aimed at achieving reading fluency in beginner readers. One of the most promising of these methodologies is the method of repeated reading. In this approach, readers practice reading one text until some predetermined level of fluency is achieved (Rasinski, 1990).

 

 

 

 

 

Explanation: This is a video that provides teachers with strategies to help their struggling readings. The strategies include, checking the picture, looking for chunks in words, getting your mouth ready. In the video Wynn, the presenter provides examples of each strategy.

Strategy:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rationale: Teaching students to identify “chunks” in words is an important step in learning to read.  Identifying these “chunks” helps to build fluency as the student will not have to stop and blend each individual sound.  Word families are groups of words that share the same ending.  For example, the words: can, Dan, fan, man, pan, ran, tan, and van all belong to the “-an” word family.   Learning these “chunks” and patterns within words also helps students spell when writing words.  Word Sliders and Word Wheels are helpful when introducing word families (Worgan, n.d.).

 

 

 

 

Additional Strategies:

• Assess the student to make sure that word decoding or word recognition is not the source of the difficulty (if decoding is the source of the problem, decoding will need to be addressed in addition to reading speed and phrasing).

• Give the student independent level texts that he or she can practice again and again. Time the student and calculate words-correct-per-minute regularly. The student can chart his or her own improvement.

• Ask the student to match his or her voice to yours when reading aloud or to a tape recorded reading.

• Read a short passage and then have the student immediately read it back to you.

• Have the student practice reading a passage with a certain emotion, such as sadness or excitement, to emphasize expression and intonation.

• Incorporate timed repeated readings into your instructional repertoire.

• Plan lessons that explicitly teach students how to pay attention to clues in the text (for example, punctuation marks) that provide information about how that text should be read.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Middle Childhood

 

Explanation: In this video the educator presents reading strategies for middle school struggling readers. She called these strategies the 7 habits of good readers. It focuses on visualizing, making connections, making inferences, question the text, determine the importance, fix-up strategies, and synthesizing. She goes into detail about each strategy.

 

Strategy: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rationale: It has been shown that when readers are taught how to make inferences, they improve their abilities to construct meaning. Indeed, research indicates that the ability to make inferences is crucial to successful reading. Visualizing is especially valuable when it is applied to narrative texts. In reading narratives, readers often can develop a clear understanding of what is happening by visualizing the setting, characters, or actions in the plot. Summarizing is an important strategy because it can enable readers to recall text quickly (Texas Educational Agency, 2002).

 

 

 

 

 

Explanation: Using Scaffolding to Improve Reading Experience-In scaffolded reading experience, teachers give students tools and techniques that help organize their reading experience in three stages:

• Pre-reading stage

• During-reading stage

• After-reading stage

Strategy:

• In the pre-reading stage, students and teachers establish the purpose for reading and activate the students’ prior knowledge of the topic. The teacher also tries to create a context for learning, a term that is becoming ever-more expansive and includes reader attitudes toward learning and reading, the support network as well as the environment where learning takes place.

• A major pre-reading strategy is to develop a list of words associated with the topic. Students generate a list of vocabulary words associated with the instructional concept, then brainstorm about more words, group them into categories and then finally name the categories.

• If the topic was WWII, for example, students might initially mention Pearl Harbor, Rosie the Riveter or the persecution of Jews, activating their background knowledge on the subject.

• Students can then elaborate on these first words with parameters set by the teacher, e.g. no more than eight groups with a minimum of three words in each group.

• “These parameters force students to think deeply about the concepts of each word and assess whether the word should be associated with a particular group,” the researchers write.

• The primary purpose of the during-reading stage is is better comprehension as students read and interact with the text.

• During reading, students can make use of the following techniques:

1. text structures noticing various text structures (e.g. narrative, expository) to become familiar with ways that information is presented;

2. visualization – creating images by looking for descriptive words and using them as clues, and

3. self-regulation – working independently of the teacher by adjusting the rate of reading, making predictions, asking questions, rereading and reading to discover answers to questions.

 

Rationale: Scaffolding not only guides learners through the complexities of the task, it may also problematize important aspects of students’ work in order to force them to engage with key disciplinary frameworks and strategies (Reiser, 2004).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Adolescent Young Adult 

 

 

Explanation: Story pyramids were originally used for narrative text, but they have been modified to be used with expository text. The story pyramid requires that the learner pay attention to the underlying structure of the text while reading.

 

Strategy: In an eight-step pyramid for expository text, students are told to:

1.    identify the topic using one word

2.    describe the topic using two words

3.    describe the setting using three words, etc.

 

• After students have read a passage, they may be asked to write a summary of the most important information in a text. It may be as concise as three sentences or as long as one page.

• Students may use the pyramid to write the topic sentence in the summary and to provide more supporting details. The closing statement should synthesize information on the topic.

 

 

                         Click on the image to view another example of a story pyramid: 

 

 

Rationale: 

As much as possible, students should be taught strategies like those

actual readers use to comprehend text successfully. Graphic organizers illustrate

concepts and their interrelationships by using diagrams or other pictorial

devices (Fielding and Pearson, 1991).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Explanation: This video shows an example of a team of teachers that use several strategies to help students figure out unknown words in a content (social studies) class. They focus on vocabualry by creating word walls and paired readings. These teachers have the strategies to help students master reading and vocabualry in the content areas. The strategies taught are easily transferred to other reading content areas. 

 

Strategy: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rationale: Words are labels for concepts, and so teaching vocabulary is actually teaching about the ideas they represent. Broadly defined learning opportunities include the incorporation of wide reading in content classes as well as word consciousness. Reading widely about a topic across a variety of texts provides students with multiple (Vacca and Vacca, 2008).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Assistive Technology 

 

 

Kurzweil 3000 provides students a compact group of study skills tools to interact with while one reads. It creates opportunities to increase comprehension, fluency, vocabulary building, decoding, metacognition and more. It can also be used a great testing or classroom accommodation which allows for instructional modification without curriculum modification!  Text can be copied and pasted into Kurzweil or scanned in and loaded to a reader’s computer in PDF format to be read outloud as it is being shown on the screen. The cost is about $1500.

 

Click on the link below to learn more about this assistive technology.

http://www.kurzweiledu.com/default.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The IntelReader is a good choice for someone who needs a lot of reading support in order to achieve independence. This relatively small hand-held device is portable and can be used in a variety of reading situations with very little set up or classroom modifications. Essentially, it’s a digital camera which takes a photo of a page in a book, worksheet, menu, etc. and then converts it into text that is shown on the screen and read out loud in a relatively human sounding voice. The cost is about $900.00.

 

Watch the video to learn more about it: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The ReadingPen is an ideal choice for a person who is a fairly fluent reader, but may still struggle reading or understanding the occasional word, but can decode and comprehend the majority of what he or she is reading. When a student comes to a word they do not understand, the student simply takes the ReadingPen and highlights it over the word and the word will be played back for the student. It’s not great for reading whole sentences or paragraphs because the voice is fairly robotic and monotone. Many of my students who have attempted this found it more distracting than helpful.  There is also a dictionary feature in the pen so a student can look up the definition of a word if needed. The cost is about $250.00.

 

Watch the video to learn more about it: