What Good Readers Do....

WHAT STRATEGIES DO GOOD READERS USE?
    
   Our friends in room 8 will become great readers!  Everyday we will work on strategies that help us learn to read.  Ask your children to use some of these strategies if they get stuck on a word.  

ENCOURAGING READING COMPREHENSION AT HOME
In the classroom, students use many comprehension strategies to help them understand what they read.  We teach these skills as a large group, and then practice within smaller groups.  Listed below are the strategies we use that you can practice with your child.  

MAKING CONNECTIONS 
When we connect a story to our own life experiences, to other stories, or an event that happens within our world, it helps readers understand the story a little more.  As your child reads, ask them if they can make a connection.  Three examples of the connections we make in third level are:

1. Text-to-Self Connection
2. Text-to-Text-Connection
3. Text-to-World Connection

QUESTIONING
Good readers ask themselves questions as they read.  They also think about where the answer may lie within the story.  As your child reads, encourage them to ask questions frequently and think about the answers.  You may already model this habit by asking questions during reading.  The sources of answers to question may...

-be answered in the text
-require some inferring
-require some previous knowledge
-require discussion
-require some further research

INFERRING
Sometimes the author doesn't like to come out and tell us all of the answers.  We often times need to dig deeper from the text to make sense of the author's message.  Third graders learn how to use inferences to help make meaning of the stories they read.  We can support our inferences with clues that the author gives us in the story.  Ask your child to make inferences and use the book to show where the clues that support the inferences come from.  

VISUALIZING 
Good readers create pictures in their minds to help them understand what is happening in the story.  Compare your mental pictures with your child as you read.  Maybe they will be similar ideas.  

Other comprehension activities that you may practice at home may include:

-retelling the story in sequence
-giving the main idea of the story
-giving details about the story
-sharing favorite parts
-sharing the parts that are interesting or surprising
-discussing and comparing characters
-identifying the problem and the solution
-making predictions about what happens next, or what happens once the story is finished?