Literacy Tips
What do good readers do?
- Read accurately
- Know what to do if they need help with a word they do not recognise
- Read the text as it would be spoken, paying attention to:
Punctuation
Speed
Tone
The natural breaks or places where the text can be split into chunks
The most important words that need emphasis
The sound of the text so it seems the writer is talking to us - Understand and can talk about what they have read.
Word Attack Strategies
When I get stuck on a word I will:
- Get my mouth ready and re-read
- Think what makes sense
- Think what looks right and makes sense
- Read onSound it out
- Look for clues inside the word
- Look for words inside the word
- Look at starting sounds, ending sounds – and sounds in the middle
Responsibility Transfer Tick Chart (RTTC)
Developed by Pene Balk-Jarvis RTLit
- Draw up a tick table by drawing two columns, and naming each at the top, one with the child’s name and the other with your name (or use table provided).
- During reading, if the child makes a mistake and self corrects, s/he is given a tick in its column (immediately).
- If s/he makes a mistake and doesn’t self correct you get a tick. This tick isn’t recorded until further through the text (so as not to alert the child to a mistake and also to give time to go back and fix up the error after thinking time and reading on). At an appropriate place in the text, tell the child s/he has made a mistake and ask the child to go back and fix it up.
- Several pages of the book may be read with an overall focus on noticing and self-correcting errors and building up a list of strategies to use when stuck on a word (relevant discussion including vocabulary, will be entered into during the reading also). Difficult words to be worked on together if necessary.At the end of the reading, the tick table to be looked at together, discussed and feedback given.
- This tick chart can be used at the beginning of the next session to feed-forward, to help set goals and learning intentions eg. “Let’s try to decrease the number of ticks that I get, so that you are noticing more errors by yourself.”
- During following session re-read previous session’s passage, repeating tick chart. On completion compare with previous chart. Continue reading some more of the book (use tick chart). Repeat at each session until book is completed, move onto next book.
(Note: The child should score more ticks than you, if not the book is probably too hard.)
