Reading Strategies Bookmark

I've been crazy busy this week and completely forgot to add a link to a freebie for you! These are Fix-Up Strategies Bookmarks that my students used to help them when they realized that what they had just read didn't make sense. We discussed that good readers are always making sure it makes sense and then we went over the steps they should go through when it doesn't make sense. 


The first part of this is STOP! Doesn't it drive you crazy when you hear a student read something that makes no sense, but they keep reading quickly and unaffected by the break-down in comprehension? A lot of struggling readers do this! Our job is to help them with this break-down and the first step is getting them to be aware when it doesn't make sense.

The next steps are to reread and slow down. Often these two things will do the trick, but if they don't help, good readers should read ahead in the paragraph. Sometimes reading the next few sentences helps make sense of what we read.

The next step is to use clues in the sentences and the sentences around it to figure out what the author means. I teach my students that clues can be in the form of pictures on the page, but most often will be found in the paragraph or on the page where the break-down in comprehension occurred. (Context clues deserves lessons of its own, which would be a great next step if you haven't covered it already.)

The next item on the bookmark is to figure out unknown words. We review our decoding/chunking skills here.

Occasionally as students become independent readers they will come across sentences that the author wrote in a literary rhythm rather than how students are used to hearing it. That is why the next step on the bookmark is to look at sentence structure. I teach them to ask themselves if the sentence would make sense if they scrambled up the words and said them in a different way. 

The next step is to make a mental picture. Usually if a student is visualizing what they are reading they can figure out what the author means. I'm a huge believer in the power of visualization -- especially in the case of struggling readers! This one is a biggie for me.

And the last one is to think. If students have worked all the way through the bookmark (which I teach them is not necessary if comprehension is rebuilt), I ask them to take a moment and think about what the author is trying to say. At this point, if students have followed all of the steps and simply cannot make sense of it, I tell them to ask me for help. (This rarely happens after we've learned how to successfully use our bookmarks.)

I hope your students enjoy these as much as my students always do. Here's the link to my TpT where you can download this for free: Fix Up Strategies Bookmarks.