Reading Strategy: Looking for Chunks!

We have been very fortunate this semester to have two fabulous education students from Dallas Baptist University interning in our class on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Today Ms. Rivera, one of the DBU interns, taught a great reading strategies lesson on "Looking for Chunks" in words. Parents, this is a great strategy you can use at home as you work with your child on reading. With this strategy, students look for sound combinations in words such as "ch", "ing", etc. that they know without having to sound them out. This helps them decode words more quickly and naturally increases their fluency. This strategy is also used to help find word wall words within larger more complex words. For example, students know the word wall word "when" so if they see the word "whenever" they do not have to sound out each individual letter but can say the first part quickly and focus on the unknown part of the word. Eventually, the more sight words they know, the easier it will be coming for them. Reading is like putting together a puzzle. At first it seems very overwhelming with so many pieces, but as you begin to lay the framework it becomes easier to put all the pieces together. At this point, students who are still at the decoding stage should be moving beyond sounding out individual sound pieces and moving it sounding out using chunks of sounds.

Thank you to both of our interns, Ms. Rivera and Ms. Anderson, for all of your hard work this semester! We really enjoyed having you in class!