• Activate Schema: Schema is everything you already know about a topic. This strategy helps students connect their prior knowledge to what they are reading. Students use their schema to to put new information into meaningful context to help them remember and understand it.

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• Picture Walk:  During a picture walk, students go through the book page by page without reading a single word. Students use this time to think deeply about what they are seeing in the pictures by asking questions, making predictions, and making connections. (Examples: What is the setting of the story? What is going on here? Who is this character? How is the character feeling right now? Where did the character go? What words might I find in the story when I read it? How will the story end? I predict the character will _______. This makes me think of _______. ) Doing this helps students better anticipate what will happen when they actually read the text and to more accurately comprehend what they are reading.

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• Thinking Bubble: Students use their thinking bubble to monitor, or listen, to their thinking while they read. This is when they would make connections, or predictions, or ask questions to themselves about what they are reading.  If they get confused, students should go back and fix-up their reading so that it makes sense and they understand what is going on in the text. 

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• Predicting: Predicting allows students to use information from the text, such as titles, headings, pictures, and diagrams to anticipate what will happen in a text. When making predictions, students envision what will come next in the text, based on their prior knowledge (schema).

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• Questioning:  Students should ask questions about the text before, during, and after they read. 

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• Visualizing:  Students should form mental images (like a movie) about the setting, characters, and action in a story. Visualizing helps students understand descriptions of complex activities or processes.

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• Connections:  Use your schema to make connections to yourself, other books you have read, and to the world. You might identify what is similar and different in regards to yourself and other characters or events in the book, another book, or to the world.

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• Inferring: Making an inference involves using what you know to make a guess about what you don't know (reading between the lines). Students who make inferences use the clues in the text along with their schema to help them figure out what is not directly said, making the text personal and memorable.

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SCHEMA + TEXT EVIDENCE = INFERENCE​

 

• Rereading Familiar Texts: This strategy helps students improve their comprehension and allows more time to build the comprehension strategies and pre-reading actions as a habit of reading.  Students will be asked to read a text multiple times before starting on any response work. This should be carried through at home.  Students should never attempt work for a  text that has only been read once through.

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• Retelling: 

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What is a Retell and Why is it Important?  An oral retell is another comprehension check in addition to asking comprehension questions about a story or text. It is an important skill in helping students become comfortable talking about and thinking deeply about what they are reading. Reading words without being able to complete an accurate retell is not true reading, but rather the ability to decode words or letter combinations. A retell needs to be accurate before moving onto higher reading levels.  An oral retell is not the same as a summary. 

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What is Included in a Retell? 

►naming and describing the characters and using proper names without character confusion

►identifying the problem(s), or big idea of the story 

► naming and describing the setting

► telling important events in sequence 

► identifying the solution(s) to the problem

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• Students first learn to use a beginning, middle, end structure for shorter texts. After that, they move to using a first, then, next, last structure with more time order words used as needed for longer texts.  Your student will be told which structure to use.

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