Reading Strategies and Skills

     Do you know how to ride a bicycle? If so, then remember back when you learned how to accomplish this balancing act on two wheels.  You probably had help practicing many different strategies for mounting the bike, getting first one foot on a pedal and then the next. Where did you practice? How many times did you practice? How many people helped you to learn how to ride the bicycle? Or did you accomplish this feat all by yourself? When you finally rode solo with ease, you then had developed the skill of riding a bicycle.  Or maybe you practiced enough to even develop the skill of riding with no hands! Whatever the case may be, you first had to learn what a bicycle was and what it would allow you to do. The process of learning how to read is similar. 

      Everyone learns different strategies for tackling the enormous job of making sense out of the letters of the English language, the alphabet, how they are combined to form words, then sentences, and finally whole texts.  Skills are the product and strategies are the processes used to read. The result is comprehension which can be a product and a process.

     For more practice or brushing up on your skills check out the strategies and skills links.

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