Literacy Strategies
Literacy strategies that teachers use in the classroom can easily be recreated and used at home. Here I will show you all the ways you can develop a well-rounded Lit Area in your home where your child can easily learn the same things they are learning in school using the same strategies, without missing a beat!
The benefits of using literacy strategies are so many. Using literacy strategies children can better comprehend texts, dissect information, build on big ideas using schema (background knowledge), decode words, and so much more!
Check out this list of strategies and let’s delve deeper into this fun subject.
Role Play - incorporating role play into learning is a great way to help children understand how and why events happened and why people behaved the way they did. For example, when I taught my 4th grade class about the American Revolution, I used role play to help students understand why there were opposing sides and how both sides chose to settle their differences. The American Revolution is a great historical subject to role play and students really love getting into the mindset of the opposing sides.
Photographs - You have several options for utilizing photographs or pictures, this may require a printer or a computer so you can look at images together with your child, or you can simply take a trip to your local library if they are open, and check out all of the books you’ll need for the subject. Looking at photographs is especially fun when learning about science, or specific time periods in history.
Socratic Method - This is one of the most fun ways I have used to teach literacy. The Socratic Method incorporates every type of learner’s skills. In this version it is a bit scaled back for home and remote learning. After reading a book, text, or passage, one child can be the illustrator of the story, while another can be the summarizer - summarizing the main points of the story. A student can also be a questioner - creating questions about the text that asks kids to think more deeply about the topic, and another student can be the facilitator. Your child can be given one task while you do another, however, if you have more than one child or a group of children, such as in a learning pod, you may assign tasks to each child depending on the number of children you have. An adult can facilitate from afar, but this is mostly an independent activity that is especially helpful for students to take ownership of their work.
Stop and Jot - This strategy asks kids to read, then stop and jot ideas in a notebook whenever they come across something interesting or that they might want to look up later for further comprehension. I like to provide super colorful and bright large sticky notes (found at Staples) for this independent activity.
Jigsaw Method - The Jigsaw Method allows your child to study things in sections. For example, if the subject is Colonialism, the subtopics for the jigsaw method can be divided into groups such as: foods eaten during the Colonialism period, Colonialism fashion, Weapons in Colonialism, Politics in Colonialism. You get the idea! This way of breaking down the parts of the topic allows your child to better absorb the many sides of a topic for increased comprehension. Jigsawing to understand a topic also helps kids speak to an issue more clearly, and also leads to better writing about the subject.
Sentence Frames and Stems - This strategy is the best for slow to get started writers and English Language Learners (ELLs). A sentence frame gives a few parts of a sentence but does not fill the whole sentence. For example, “Minute Men were called that because they ______________ and they also wore __________ instead of uniforms because ____________.” It’s the child’s job to fill in the blanks. A sentence stem is the first part of the sentence. For example, “_______________ had to be ready at a moment’s notice.” In case you haven’t guessed - I loved teaching American history!
One additional way to keep your young ones busy is to create a folder with extension activities for when they are done with their work. There are many things you can create at home. For example, you can buy a bag of popsicle sticks and write different activities on them with a Sharpie marker. The sticks can go into a plastic page protector sleeve and added to a folder or 3 ring binder for your child to peruse for fun learning activities to do. You can write your own fun ideas, such as “read a passage from your favorite book,” or “write about your favorite movie characters and why they are your favorite,” or “Compare your two favorite super heroes - which one is better? Why?” You can sit with your child and create the activities to write on the popsicle sticks together. Making your kids a part of the learning process really reduces the anxiety of wondering whether your kids are learning and it helps them to view learning as fun and not a chore. Check out my website for easy and fantastic lessons for grades 3 - 5! Elementaryreadingandwriting.com. See you there!
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With lots of love for your little one’s learning, Lexx