It was lovely to see all of you last week during our student led parent-teacher conferences. Your children were stars! I thought I would take this opportunity to review a few of the reading strategies we've been working on in school so that you can continue to support your child while reading at home.
We have focused on the all-important comprehension strategy of ‘Check for Understanding.’Your children are learning that readers stop often to go back and remember what they read by doing a quick re-tell before reading on. When you are reading with your child, stop every page or so and model “Checking for Understanding.” That means you talk out loud about what you just read.
We have also been working on the strategy of 'cross checking' . This strategy came up quite a bit during our conferences so I thought I would review it for you:
Cross-checking is when students look at the picture,look at the letters in the word and cross check to see that they match and sound right as well as make sense. For example, the page of a book I'm reading has a picture of a peacock and instead I read ‘bird’. I would show the class that when we cross check, the picture started with a letter P for peacock, but I read bird instead. That couldn’t work because bird starts with the letter B. So I would have to go back and reread it to make the correction that looked right, sounded right and made sense.
The VERY best way to support your child in school is by reading to them for a minimum of 20 minutes each night. Spending that quality time with your child will help develop their vocabulary, comprehension, pre-reading skills as well as their ability to sit and focus.
Invest the time at home with your child each day by reading to them, playing a variety of games and talking with them for extended periods of time! Here a few great links to on- line audio books:
- www.library.pe.ca (click on Tumblebooks and choose French)
- www.speakaboos.com (great for nursery rhymes, fairy tales etc...)
Report cards will be going home on the 24th. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any concerns, questions or great ideas!
Take care of each other,
Mme Carolyn and M. Terry
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