As a K-2 teacher, most of you have probably seen or heard of the Reading Buddies or Beanie Baby Strategies.
These seem like an engaging way to encourage students to use explicitly taught strategies. There’s over 1,500 resources for them on Teachers Pay Teachers.
But wait, what are these strategies?
Tryin Lion – try starting the sentence again -like what a running start?
Eagle Eye – Take your eyes off the text and look at the picture to try and guess the word?
Lips the Fish – get your mouth ready to say the word?
Guessing Strategies Don’t work. They are actually what struggling readers do.
We as educators can do better.
With direct explicit phonics instruction and orthographic mapping of irregular pattern words students will have the tools to decode words.
But I still like the engagement of the reading buddies or beanie babies!
Me too!
So I created a new bulletin board set that focuses on research based strategies that keep students focused on the text using these phonics and decoding skills!
Better Reading Buddies – These strategies include:
Say the Sounds Snake – Say each sound then blend it together.
Find the Vowel Frog – Find the vowel and say the sound – this can be useful for students who just start at the beginning to blend AND multi syllable words
Looking Lion – Look for the parts you know
Break it up Bear – Break the word into chunks or syllables
Check it Cheetah – Check to see if the word makes sense by reading the whole sentence. After all, meaning is still important. I would do this strategy last after they have decoded.
This way I can still use the cute beanie babies and the students still LOVE them AND make sure I am using research-based strategies for my students while using reading buddies.
Before:
After:
To grab the better research-based bulletin board and strategies click HERE to go to my TPT store!
PIN IT FOR LATER
2 Responses