Thinking About How You Read READING STRATEGIES Thinking About How You Read

Metacognition: Thinking About How You Think Before you can truly improve your reading skills, you need to understand what happens in good readers’ minds while they read. You may even do these things already. You just don’t know it…yet.

More About Metacognition Good readers have developed good habits when they read. We call these habits strategies. Strategies help readers understand, connect to, and determine the importance of what they are reading. They also visualize, ask questions about, and read between the lines of what they read.

The Reading Strategies There are seven reading strategies. Making Connections Wondering (Questioning) Noticing (Determining importance) Inferring and Predicting (Guessing) Visualizing (Picturing) Figuring out (Synthesizing) Using Fix Up Strategies

CONNECTING Text to Self (similar events in your life) Text to Text (books, movies, T.V., etc.) Text to Life (real world events)

How do good readers make connections? Ask Yourself: What do I already know about this? Has anything similar ever happened to me? How would I feel if this happened to me? Can I relate to the characters? Does this story remind me of something?

How does making connections help me think as I read? Making connections helps me understand the story. When I can think of a similar experience to the one in the story, I can better understand what is happening and what characters are feeling. When I understand what is happening, I can remember the story and the story is more interesting to read.

CONNECT yourself to the text! Make Connections CONNECT yourself to the text! Go past the OBVIOUS!

WONDERING Ask Questions What don’t I get? What do I get? What words don’t I understand? What other questions do I have? What do I wonder about as I read?

Why Ask Questions? Asking questions helps keep you focused on the text. If your mind wanders, you will not understand. Then you will be bored. If you run into problems, things you just don’t understand, then you can check yourself with a question.

NOTICING Pick and choose which details are the most important to remember. Get the bigger ideas and themes. Use text features and clues to help you figure out the important information. Some features and clues include italicized words, pictures, graphs, key words, and headings Always look over the entire selection to get an idea of what the topic is about. Carefully highlight key information.

Why Determine Importance? It helps me not have to memorize the whole text. It helps me figure out what is important information and what is not important to remember. It helps me figure out what the text is about as whole. It helps me to remember to stop and ask myself if what I am reading makes sense. It helps me look at features such as bold words, italicized words, pictures, captions, headings, and graphs and know that I should pay attention to these words.

GUESSING Infer and Predict Good readers are like detectives. They use clues to determine what is happening in a story. This is called INFERENCE!

How do good readers infer? Read between the lines Make own discoveries without the author directly stating Use text clues, prior knowledge, and questions to come up with a conclusion Create meaning based on own notions

Infer and Predict Good readers also make educated guesses about what may happen later in the story. They use the author’s hints to PREDICT what will most likely occur.

Infer and Predict Ask Yourself: What isn’t stated that I have figured out? What do I predict will happen? Why do I think so?

How does inferring help me think as I read? Draw conclusions based on clues in the text Make predictions before and during reading Surface underlying themes Use implicit information from the text to create meaning during and after reading Use the pictures to help gain meaning

Infer and Predict REMEMBER: KNOWLEDGE + TEXT = INFERENCE

PICTURE Visualize Picture in your mind the images the author creates with his/her words. Pay close attention to sensory details. For example, if you were there, what would you SEE, HEAR, SMELL, TASTE, TOUCH, FEEL?

How Do Good Readers Visualize? Create pictures in their head Make the words on the page real and concrete Create a movie of the text in their head Build meaning as they go by visualizing Create images from all of their senses

How Does Visualizing Help Me Think As I Read? Enhances meaning with mental pictures Links past experience to the words and ideas in the text Enables me to place myself in the story Strengthens my relationship to the text Stimulates my imaginative thinking Keeps me engaged with the text Brings joy to my reading Personalizes reading Allows the words to come alive Hmm…what do I see?

Why Visualize? If you don’t picture the events of the story, you will get bored. The author’s job is to paint pictures in the reader’s mind. The reader’s job is to visualize what the author describes. Why not?

FIGURE OUT Synthesize Synthesize is a fancy way of saying that you must bring everything together in the end. In other words, what is the meaning of what you are reading?

Synthesize Ask Yourself: What does it all mean? What’s the big idea? Are there questions still left unanswered? What are the lessons I should learn? What do I think about this book?

How Do Good Readers Synthesize? Take individual pieces of information and combine them with our background knowledge Form a new picture or ideas from the pieces of information Create an original idea See a new perspective Combine the strategies of making connections, visualizing, questioning, inferring, and summarizing Ask ourselves, “How has our thinking changed from reading the text?”

How does synthesizing help me think as I read? Take in a lot of different facts, think about them, and learn something new Sift through a lot of information, take out the key ideas and put them together to get the overall sense of the reading material Weave together my own ideas and what I read into new, complete thoughts Use the prompts: I have learned that… This gives me an idea… Now I understand that…

Use Fix-Up Strategies Make sure you are understanding what you are reading. When you run into trouble (you just don’t get it), use little correction strategies to help you figure out what went wrong. We call these methods FIX-UP STRATEGIES.

Use Fix-Up Strategies Here are some examples of Fix-Up Strategies: Re-read Underline Use a Dictionary Read Aloud Ask for Help

Why Use Strategies? Strategies create a plan of attack. Then you can solve any reading problems yourself. Strategies help you learn HOW to understand. If you know HOW to understand, then you are more likely TO understand. Strategies help you realize HOW you are thinking, so that you can think more deeply and more consciously.

Why Use Strategies? REMEMBER THIS: You may be using some or all of these strategies already. You just may not know it. However, as you learn to read more complicated materials, you WILL NEED to use these strategies purposefully. SO PRACTICE!