Prompts to Support the Use of Strategies

Below I have given you the major teaching prompts that can be used with a student to promote the use of strategies in a child's reading. The prompts come from Fountas and Pinnell's book "Guided Reading: Good First Teaching for All Children" which as you already know I highly recommend. This gives the teacher the language to use with a student based on the strategy needing to be emphasized. It is an excellent resource! After taking a running record or several running records with a student and having analyzed it/them, it will be apparent what strategies and cue sources the child is neglecting. The prompts can then be used to lead the child to using the strategy they are neglecting. For example, say that a child consistently sounds words out making miscues that don't make sense with the story but are very visually similar to the actual word. Rather than focusing on the visual (sounding out) aspect, it might be helpful to point out to the child, "Does that make sense? Check your picture and think about what would make sense." With a simple glance at the picture and thinking about what would make sense, the word may pop right out of his mouth. This promotes the use of the visual cues (sounding the word out) along with the meaning of the story. Remember the goal of reading is to comprehend so we don't want to have children so focused on sounding words out that they lose sight of the real purpose of reading. I have experienced many great "sounder outers" who read flawlessly but have very poor comprehension. If your child is struggling in reading, I would highly recommend that you learn how to take running records (which I have numerous posts about) and consider reading Fountas and Pinnell's book.