by Melody Ward

Created on: June 01, 2008   Last Updated: June 07, 2008

Many primary age children say, "I can't read." Some people think that by reading the words the understanding will just come. This is not so for all readers. There are readers who read beautifully but do not comprehend. There are those others who comprehend but lack fluency and struggle with decoding. The key to reading is making the invisible process of reading visible for early readers. Reading strategies should be introduced individually and the process repeated often. Modeling shows early readers what good readers do. Along with modeling there needs to be the coaching process so that the early reader can try the strategies that good readers do. During modeling and coaching, thinking aloud helps to make the process visible and show early readers what to do to keep the meaning of the text from breaking down. Pre-reading, during reading, and post reading strategies can cause early readers to become good readers.

A text could be chosen for a certain skill that needs to be reinforced. For example, to reinforce contractions choose a book that has a lot of contraction words in it. For homonyms, choose a book that has examples of homonyms. There are sight word books available that focus on one or two sight words at a time. Choosing a book that focuses on a skill helps early readers to recognize individual words in context. Some readers have the ability to read a word by itself but when it is placed in context they do not recognize the word. Writing sentences from a book onto sentence strips, then cutting up those sentences, also helps readers to take those individual words and recognize them in context.

Before reading, good readers familiarize their self with the book they are getting ready to read. Early readers begin reading without building knowledge about the book or what they know. Reading the title, the author, and the book commercial helps familiarize the book. A good reader is thinking about what they know about the subject, if they have read anything previously by the same author or experienced any of the art before by the illustrator. They are tapping into how they relate to the book either through text to text, text to their self or their own experiences, or text to world or the environment. Sometimes early readers do not have enough background knowledge about what they are preparing to read. In this case they need to be supplied the background knowledge in order to protect the meaning from breaking down while reading.

Depending on the length of the book

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