1. Thinking About How You Read
READING STRATEGIES
Thinking About How You Read

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. The Reading Strategies
Make Connections
Clarify
Summarize
Ask Questions
Predict
Infer
Visualize
Using Literary Elements

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

6. 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?

7. Make Connections
CONNECT yourself to the text!
Go pass the OBVIOUS!

8. Clarify Clarify any vocabulary words you don’t know.
Read unknown words in the context of the sentence to try to determine meaning.
Example: The teacher was very ambiguous about what the assignment was for tonight and I didn’t understand it.
What does “ambiguous” mean?
Look at the end of the sentence – the student did not understand the assignment so “ambiguous” must mean the directions for the assignment were unclear.

9. Reading Workshop Reading Response Journal
Divide your journal in half – put a sticky note in the middle to mark the section where you will be taking notes and writing responses.
The front half will be for your reading responses.
Put your name on the front of your notebook.

10. Reading Journal Example
Date (Never forget)
Title of Book Author
Pages read today
Connection
What connection did you use? T-S; T-T; T-W
Write your connection – When Stella brought home
the cat reminds me of the day I found my cat, Shamone.
Clarify -Find an unknown word or a word you just like.
Print the word – write down your word – and then try to define it by how it is used in a sentence. If it is just a word you like, then define it and tell why you like it.
Add page number where word is located.
You must use both of these strategies every day!
On Friday you will do a summary of your reading for the week – it must be at least 12 lines long. Turn in notebook and receive 25 pts per week that will weigh 15% of your grade.

11. Summary
What Is Summarizing? Summarizing is how we take larger selections of text and reduce them to their bare essentials: the gist, the key ideas, the main points that are worth noting and remembering. Webster's calls a summary the "general idea in brief form"; it's the distillation, condensation, or reduction of a larger work into its primary notions.

12. Summary
What Are We Doing When We Summarize? We strip away the extra words and extra examples. We focus on the heart of the matter. We try to find the key words and phrases that, when uttered later, still manage to capture the gist of what we've read. We are trying to capture the main ideas and the crucial details necessary for supporting them.

13. Summary What Did You Want To Do? Pull out main ideas
Focus on key details
Use key words and phrases
Break down the larger ideas
Write only enough to convey the main ideas
Take complete notes

14. Ask Questions What don’t you get? What do you get?
What words don’t you understand?
What other questions do you have?
What do you wonder about as you read?

15. 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.

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

17. 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.

18. 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?

19. Infer and Predict
REMEMBER:
KNOWLEDGE + TEXT = INFERENCE

20. Determine Importance
Pick and choose which details are the most important to remember.
Think about what a teacher might ask on a test.
Think about what the author hints might be important later on.

21. 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?

22. 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?

23. Why Determine Importance?
Anything you read contains a lot of information. You cannot remember everything. By deciding what is important, you don’t have to remember everything. You can prioritize the information you need in order to understand.

24. 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?

25. 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?

26. 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.

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

28. 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.

29. Why Use Strategies? REMEMBER:
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!