What’s Your Strategy?
By Barclay Marcell

Joey is a second grade student who excels at sounding out phonetically regular words such as, "hat," "rat" and "splat." He can masterfully decode sentences such as, "Nat sat on a tack," or even, "Gail and Jane are going to Spain." Yet, for all his deliberate decoding, Joey cannot tell me what happened to Nat or where the girls are going. When faced with an unknown word from a passage correlated to his instructional level, Joey's primary word attack strategy is that of sounding out. Though he can decipher nonsensical stuff in decodable texts – "Nob hopped over the log and then shopped with Bob," he cannot make sense of books in the Henry and Mudge (by Cynthia Rylant, Aladdin) or Frog and Toad (by Arnold Lobel, HarperCollins) series.

Joey needs to move from the Nob and Bob books to the world of fully-developed characters having adventures with clear beginnings, middles and endings. But how could I turn a deliberate decoder into a strategy seeker?

New reading buddies are there to lend a hand – or paw – whenever students get stuck on a tricky word.

A strange menagerie. Over the years, I've made the discovery that some children grasp the strategies while others remain reliant on an isolated tactic. There must be another way to make reading strategies come alive, I reasoned, and stick so that students like Joey would begin to use them independently, without me having to constantly prompt him. Quite unexpectedly, an idea came to me one day in the form of a stuffed frog, kangaroo, monkey and snake. This strange menagerie now lives in my classroom and in the strategy banks of all my students.

New reading buddies. After I raided my daughter's collection of Beanie Babies™, I sat down to hash out my new reading strategy. First I decided that Sammy, the Sound-it-Out Snake would hiss to my students, "Sssound out the beginning, middle and ending of a word." His good friend, Skip-It, the frog, would (literally) hop over a tricky word and always remember to hop back and try to figure it out. Cluey, the Kangaroo Detective, would ask, "Now, what would make sense? Are there any clues?" And finally, at the opportune moment, Chunky the Monkey would drop in to model his favorite strategy and ask, "Are there any familiar word chunks or letter patterns inside the bigger word?"

I later made up a song, readers theatre play, poster and bookmark to help my students remember the strategies. Space was allocated on my strategy wall to house our new friends. With these tools in hand, I was ready to introduce my students to their new reading buddies.

Bag of tricks.The morning I brought my bag of tricks to school I announced that four friends would be joining us during reading time and that our new friends would be helping us whenever we got stuck on a tricky word.

Suddenly, Sammy slithered out of the bag and he reminded my students to, "Sssound out beginning, middle and ending sssounds" in words with which they have trouble. He demonstrated this technique with his favorite word, "mouse." He hissed out the /m/, /ou/ and the /s/ and said, "The letter /e/ ssseems to be silent. The word must be 'mouse.' "

Next came Skip-It. He got stuck while reading a sentence and said, "Mudge blank his tail," and hopped to the end. Cluey, the Kangaroo Detective, took a good look at the sentence and asked, "Now, what would make sense here?"

Chunky Monkey announced that he saw a familiar word inside the tricky bigger word. "I used to have a lot of trouble with reading," he said, "and then I figured out how to look for chunks."

Finally, one of my students couldn't resist shouting out the word. "Wag! Wagged! The word is 'wagged!'" she said.

"That's it!" I told her. "The word 'wagged' looks right, sounds right and it makes sense!"

Success! We were off and running. Over the course of the next few lessons, teacher modeling followed by student practice became the focus of our guided reading lessons. Class time usually began with the Reading Strategy song and its hand signals and ended with an impromptu questioning session. My students read with sticky notes in hand to mark tricky words and later share their favorite strategies. There was a palpable excitement in the room and a shared feeling of success.

The culminating activity was the reading, practicing and performing of our readers theatre selection, complete with props and character accompaniment. Our new Reading Buddies quite literally came alive for the children as the kids themselves acted out the roles of the individual strategy characters. This also served the dual purpose of improving fluency through repeated readings with an authentic purpose. Without realizing it, students used the strategies while reading about them at the same time. We had a final Strategy Party and performed our play and I gave each child a goody bag containing mini-versions of the strategy characters.

My students had taught their parents the song and the strategies, acted out the play for other groups but best of all, they'd begun to refer to our friends with statements such as, "Skip-It says to…" or "Cluey wants you to ask what would make sense…" Metacognition became a natural part of reading. My students had taken their first footsteps toward fluency and what I hoped would be a lifelong love of reading.

I knew this venture was a success and one I'd use again in years to come when I overheard Joey struggling with the word chihuahua – a tough word for any reader to sound out. "Now what would make sense?" I heard him mutter. "Are there any picture clues? It starts with a /ch/…Mudge is playing with a small dog…it looks like the Taco Bell™ dog. What's that dog called?" He thought a little bit longer and said, "I know! It's a chihuahua! It looks right, sounds right and it makes sense!"

"Wow, Joey!" I exclaimed. "You used all the reading strategies to figure out a very tricky word! You're a great reader!"