by Susan Zimmermann and Chryse Hutchins
7 Keys:
1. Create mental images: Good readers create a wide range of visual, auditory, and other sensory images as they read, and they become emotionally involved with what they read.
"When I start reading, it's like turning on the TV. I pretend to put a movie on in my head."
"It's like you are in the book, but you're invisible and you're watching everything but the characters don't notice you.
2. Use background knowledge: Good readers use their relevant prior knowledge before, during and after reading to enhance their understanding of what they are reading.
Text to Self: what you read reminds you of something from your own life.
Text to text: what you read reminds you of something else you have read or seen on tv or at the movies.
Text to world: What you read reminds you of something in the broader world.
3. Ask questions: Good readers generate questions before, during and after reading to clarify meaning, make predictions, and focus their attention on what's important.
4. Make Inferences: Good readers use their prior knowledge and information from what they read to make predictions, seek answers to questions, draw conclusions, and create interpretations that deepen their understanding of the text.
Reading between the lines.
Make predictions. From the cover of the book, ask your child to predict the story.
Figure out the unknown words by using clues, visual evidence, and their understanding of the story and by thinking about what would make sense. The clues to figuring out the mystery word are often in the picture and preceding sentences.
Playing the word games helps to develop the inferring skill. Asking 20 questions to figure out what word it is.
Figure out the big message.
An inference is when you take the important words and turn them into thoughts. They get trapped in your head, making you stop and think about ideas the author hasn´t quite told you.
5. Determine the most important ideas or themes: Good readers identify key ideas or themes as they read, and they can distinguish between important and unimportant information.
6. Synthesize information: Good readers track their thinking as it evolves during reading, to get the overall meaning.
7. Use "fix-up" strategies: Good readers are aware of when they understand and when they don't. If they have trouble understanding specific words, phrases, or longer passages, they use a wide range of problem-solving strategies including skipping ahead, rereading, asking questions, using a dictionary, and reading the passage aloud.
