Skipping words encourages children to scan ahead and look for words they know. This is extremely detrimental to children’s self-esteem, confidence, and reading development. This leads to frustration, guessing, and skipping. The levelling system leaves something to be desired, and most of the books are inappropriate for beginning readers. They are not levelled in a way that moves from simple words to more complex ones. The Fountas and Pinnell reading system and the Leveled Literacy Intervention are not levelled in a way that matches language development or hierarchy. For example, a word like “blimp” is a LOT easier to read than a word like “laugh.” The Flaws in Leveled Systems For this reason, I use words where the letters make their usual sounds, where syllables and sounds go together. We want to make reading sensible so kids can quickly see how letters and sounds go together. Yet, schools often use texts that have words that are too long, too hard, and too obscure for students to figure out how the letters and sounds go together naturally.
We want to control the complexity of words and linguistic structures like word forms and sentences. Schools often use “levelled” books that are not “levelled” in a logical way. My immediate thought: if there are words that a student needs to skip in the text, then it is very likely that the chosen text is too complicated and therefore inappropriate. However, I would never use any system like this. I was tempted to give this strategy a zero, but I’m trying to be open and generous. It may promote word identification in independent reading.It may help with the child’s confidence.Strategy Countdown: Worst-to-Best, Part 1 #10: The WORST Strategy on This List: Check It, Chicks: Make sure it looks right, sounds right, and makes sense.Slow Down Snail: Slow down if it doesn’t seem right.Flip the Dolphin: flip the vowel sound.Chunky Monkey: Find the chunks or little words you know.Skippy Frog: Skip the word, then go back.The strategies we will go over are as follows, in no particular order: By reading through the blog series, you might just be able to integrate strategies that can help.Įach method has a catchy title, a short description, and a picture of an animal. If you have a young reader at home, you will need to tweak their reading habits-to stop detrimental practices and guide them to better ones. I will then rank these strategies from worst to best. This post will kick off a multi-part blog series where I look at different strategies, discuss their pros and cons, and rate the system from 1–10. I had a meaningful conversation with this parent that I would like to share with you around the value-and dangers-of some of these strategies! One of my clients recently shared some of their school’s reading strategies for Grade One students.