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Effective Reading Cues for Early Readers

What can I do to help my kindergartener read?  

How can I help my first grader read different books?

Why isn't my first grader reading accurately?

How can I help my struggling second grader with the words he doesn't know?


All good questions and ones that I have heard from concerned parents and teachers.  The good news is that we can give our students strategies that work.  


Teaching students the letter/sound relationship and how it applies to decoding words is called phonics.  A child with a strong awareness of sounds, how to make rhymes and play with sounds will have a stronger chance of being successful when the time comes to start applying those sounds to print (graphemes), phonics.  We are going to focus on the cues (strategies) that we can teach children to give them a greater chance of successfully reading.


First, consider the kind of text you are providing your students.  Early readers should be provided with more controlled text in order to form a solid foundation of word attack strategies.  This does not mean never giving them authentic text.  This just means that there should be a mix and when you are teaching a phonics strategy for decoding, then the text should be decodable at their level of learning.  For example if you haven't taught them words with silent e, inflected endings, or vowel teams....then you may want to push that text to another time and go with something that they can actually decode with some support.  Again, this is not all the time but it should be a consideration and it should be balanced.


So you have a decodable text that you think is a good fit for your students.  Let's teach them how to use it INDEPENDENTLY!  That's what a strategy is for!  We want them to be successful when reading alone.  They need to get secure with using those strategies under guidance so they can then practice on their own.  

Here is the sequence of strategies I recommend that are directly related to the science of reading for our early reader friends...

1. Use your reading finger 

  • puts focus on the text
  • draws eyes and attention to the letter & sounds (graphemes)
  • promotes proper tracking
2. Start at the left
  • promotes proper directionality and muscle memory
3. Say each sound
  • supports letter/sound relationships
  • encourages effective decoding skills
4. Blend the sounds together
  • supports phonological awareness
  • encourages effective decoding skills
5.  Does it sound right?
  • promotes metacognition and listening to reading
  • encourages the idea that reading is thinking and we should understand what we read
You can find these steps used in my upcoming Decodable Sentences Pack!  In the meantime.....check out the FREEBIE reserved as a preview for my email list members ONLY!  

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