Throwback Thursday: Think-Alouds

I’m linking up for another Throwback Thursday with Cara Carroll. I just love this easy linky party! Roll out of bed and find an old post that (hopefully) is worth reposting. I’ve been doing a lot of posts about new products and sales, so I thought I’d post something totally organic and unrelated to selling anything! I promise when the school year returns I will get back to more of these posts. 🙂  

Today’s post was originally posted on November 12, 2012. You can see it here. 

The goal of guided reading is to give your students the tools to become independent readers. The main way you do this is by teaching them strategies. Strategies are the key to guided reading! These strategies will help them when they get to a word they don’t know and when they’ve read a word incorrectly. I think of those as accuracy strategies. There are also strategies to improve comprehension. There have been numerous posts about strategies by other bloggers. There are so many great resources out there! I will post another day about strategies I use, along with how I introduce and model them.

When I introduce a strategy, I tell them about the strategy, then I model how to apply it. I do this using Think-Alouds.  At the beginning of the year, I mostly use Think-Alouds to teach those accuracy strategies (like chunking words, skipping and going back, thinking about what makes sense). As the year goes on, I’ll continue to do this as needed, but I start to use them more to model comprehension strategies.

I went back and forth about which post to do first, but then I realized that Think-Alouds are such a big part of how I teach so I opted to go with this first.

What is it?

Usually your comprehension of a text and decoding words happens in your head. When doing a Think-Aloud, you are vocalizing these thoughts and explaining your thinking process. The teacher is using words, that the students will understand, to communicate strategies good readers use while reading. I think this is one of the most important things a teacher can do. To do this, read aloud from a text and stop frequently to make predictions, make connections, clarify meaning (I also call this a “check in”), ask a question, summarize and decode words (use those accuracy strategies).

How do I use them?

To guide students in this process, there are questions and phrases you can teach them.

To encourage your students, you could stop while reading and say/hold up one of those prompts from above and have them finish your sentence. You could have them finish your sentence in reader response journals or whisper to the person next to them.

When I am planning my guided reading instruction, I often look for good opportunities for students to apply this strategy. For example, if there is a page where I know my kiddos can all make a connection, I put a sticky note there and make a point to guide my students to stop and make that connection.

Being able to monitor their thinking and articulate these thoughts is a pretty advanced skill, but that is what we want our kiddos to be able to do.

Freebie!

Here is a graphic organizer that your students can use:

To use this sheet, first make sure you’ve taught all the strategies that are included. Choose your text. For extra scaffolding, find a part in the text that would lend itself to using one or more of these strategies. Have your students read, then stop them to do their Think-Aloud. You decide how much support you want to give them. At first, you may want to choose the strategy for them and start them out by using one of the prompts listed above. As they get better, you can let them choose which strategy they want to use. Kids love to share ideas, so they may do better if they get a chance to share their Think Aloud first, before filling out this sheet.

You could also use this sheet each time you teach a new strategy. You could then put all the sheets together to make a little book of all their Think Alouds.

Remember, using the Think Aloud strategy isn’t something that is taught once or twice. It is on-going and it is used to introduce/model/practice ALL the other strategies (accuracy and comprehesion strategies).

Phew, that took a lot longer than I anticipated! Thank goodness I have such a sweet, supportive husband to take my kids out to play in the puddles for the past hour! I’d love to hear from you!! Comments are what keeps me blogging, so don’t be shy! 🙂

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Check out the other Throwback posts by clicking on the picture below:

Have a great day everyone! 

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