All Around Reading Skills
- Read aloud to your children – often. Use good literature.
- Teach vocabulary directly and in the course of daily life —
Vocabulary notebook for the very young – cut pictures out and write single words in large lower case letters.
Flash cards – stickers, drawings, written definitions.
Fluency and Comprehension
- Use tape recorder for feedback – practice reading passages out loud for smooth reading. Do “before and after tapes” to demonstrate improvement.
- Practice selected passages until children can read as easily as they speak – and with meaning.
- Create ‘advance organizers’ to support weak skills (for those who have trouble writing and those who cannot locate key facts).
- Write out KEY ideas with blanks for selected facts that students must locate.
- Help students use visual mapping or “webs” that will assist in visualizing and remembering.
Older Students
- Have students read questions first in new text selections – this increases focus and improves comprehension.
- Teach students to highlight as they read (if using consumable texts).
- Teach specific skills of finding KEY words in questions and then scanning/skimming to find the same word or phrase to locate answers.
- Do “sword drills” with dictionaries or have students compete to be first to find text pages after looking up page numbers in index.
- Teach the “PQRST” strategy
P – Pre-read by looking through chapter — check out pictures, captions, and graphs
Q – Read the questions (or ask yourself some)
R – Read the text, noting answers to your own questions as you read –in some cases WRITE answers as you go to text questions
S – Study the material you have read. Make notes, make sure your know the words in the text. Ask student, “Can you tell me about it?”
T – Test yourself on what you have read