Reading Comprehension
It is hard to believe that October is already here! Prairieview's small intervention groups are up and running. In those groups that focus on reading comprehension there are 4 strategies that we teach to help students comprehend text. Those strategies are predicting, questioning, clarifying and summarizing. Good readers are constantly making predictions about what will happen next or what they might read about next. When readers are predicting, we know they are thinking about what they are reading. Good readers also ask themselves questions about what they are reading. It can be questions that are answered in the text or questions that they need to be answered from an outside source. Once again, if readers are asking themselves questions, we know they are thinking about what they are reading. The third strategy we teach our students to use is clarifying. Clarifying can mean figuring out words that we can not read by sight by chunking them into parts that we can read. It can also mean going back and rereading while using context clues and/or picture clues to help us understand a part of the book that was confusing. The final strategy we want the students to use is summarizing. When students stop after reading a portion of a book and take the time to summarize what they have read, they can figure out pretty quickly if they are actually thinking about what they read or if they were just letting the words go in one eye and out the other. When reading together as a family, I would encourage you to use these same strategies to reinforce what we are teaching here at school.
Chess Club
Chess Club got off to a great start this week. This week both Tuesday's and Thursday's clubs will be meeting. I could still use more parent volunteers if anyone would like to join us. Even if you could only help out for a week or two, I would appreciate it!
