Hi everyone! I want to start a new series that shares various strategies you can use in your classroom. It is going to be posted sporadically. It is my goal to help build confidence when it comes to teaching reading and writing and to share ideas and inspiration in those areas. 🙂 I want these posts to include practical strategies you can implement in your classroom. I will also be sharing many freebies along the way to help you apply these strategies in your classroom. 😉
Strategies have been a bit of a buzzword over the past few years, and rightfully so. It’s important for every teacher to have a tool bag of strategies to use in their instruction throughout the day. Today, I mainly want to focus on what defines strategies and how they apply to teaching. Now before you click out of this post because you already know that vocabulary word, lol, hear me out. I think we all get the definition, but lets be nerds for a bit to really “get” how strategies apply to teaching. I promise to make it short and sweet. After this post, it is my goal to share some strategies for each Strategy Share post. That way, you can fill-up your teaching tool bag. 😉 I already have some strategy tools for your tool bag written up to go with this one. You can choose “Strategy Share” in the categories on the right to find all of the current posts.
First off, strategies are a means that students can use to obtain a goal. An example of a goal would be to get your students reading on a second grade level. The goal of reading on a second grade level is reached by developing various skills such as decoding skills, reading comprehension skills, and so on. Strategies are the practical steps to developing those skills. The skill may be a necessity for obtaining that goal, but there may be several different strategies that can be used to develop that skill and eventually reach that goal. Just like there may be several different steps you take to make sure students gain those decoding skills. Maybe you teach some strategies like Eagle Eye (use your eagles eyes to look for picture clues) or Lips the Fish (say the beginning sound), and maybe you use different strategy methods. The strategy here has a fun theme with an eagle, and the decoding skill being taught is to look for picture clues. Neither Eagle Eyes or Lips the Fish or any other specific method is the ultimate way to gaining those decoding skills. You could very well teach students to simply look for pictures to help decode the word without a fun eagle theme or come up with a completely other way to teach them to look for picture clues. Therefore, it is important when using strategies to remember the strategy is not what is most important. It is the skill being developed that is needed to reach that goal. If one strategy does not work for your students or even your teaching style, it is ok. Find a different strategy that does. I hope to be able to share many strategies that will help your students to develop those skills and reach those goals.
Now with that said, I hope you find the strategies I share practical and helpful. And maybe, some will even inspire you to bounce other ideas off of them. I love bounced ideas! I really would love to hear from you, so always feel free to comment below on my posts. I would love this to be a collaborative learning where many of us come together to learn new ideas and even grow new ones.
Make sure to join my email list, so you can get some strategies in your email box. There will be plenty of exclusive freebies along the way with this series too! 🙂
Thanks for visiting The Candy Class blog. Happy teaching!
Jolene Mathew
On a Mission to Improve Literacy