Sunday, June 10, 2012

Top Ten Strategies 4 and 5


Think Alouds
The purpose of think alouds is to model for students the thought process that takes place when difficult material is presented. Teachers verbalize their thoughts while they read orally. This helps students understand comprehension strategies better because they can see how the mind can respond to thinking through trouble spots. In turn, think alouds can help the students construct meaning from the text. A good example of how to use think alouds would be to preview a chapter by looking at titles, subtitles, graphic organizers, and pictures to get an overall view of what the chapter is going to be about. It might include making predictions, creating mental pictures, connecting information to prior knowledge, creating analogies, and verbalizing obstacles as well as strategies to overcome obstacles while reading science material. I plan on using this strategy for my struggling readers.

Jig Saw
The purpose of jig saw is to help students with texts that have difficult vocabulary. This struggling reader strategy involves forming two groups of students: the home group and the expert group. Students start off by being in the home groups of four or five at the introduction of the lesson. Then the groups separate, and each member moves to one of four or expert groups where they read, study, and discuss a certain text passage, article or topic. The students return to their home groups and each member either teachers the others what they learned.
            This tool will be great to use with difficult text. As a teacher I can locate reading passages with varying reading levels to allow my ELLs and other low level readers to participate fully.  My students will gain the knowledge they need to bring back to their home groups through discussion in the expert groups. This is also another tool that can be used to gauge the reading comprehension of my students.

Both of these strategies can be used for struggling readers.

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