Teaching Reading Skills and Strategies

How do you teach reading skills in your classroom? My biggest fear as a teacher was that my students would not comprehend what they were reading. Therefore, I always set a goal to grow my students into successful independent readers. I created a plan and throughout the years I gathered many basic ideas and strategies to help me teach my students important reading skills and strategies. Today, I will share several ideas to help you teach your students to become successful independent readers.

Reading Skills & Strategies: Before, During, and After Reading

It is important to expose students to many different techniques to help them be successful in breaking down a text and truly comprehending it. Therefore I implemented the strategies Before Reading, During Reading and After Reading to help break our reading strategies into chunks.

Preview this chart I hung in my classroom (you can blow this up to poster size or create an anchor chart with it). You can download this free poster in the freebie library!

By applying these strategies my students were able to break down the text and truly understand what they were reading therefore moving onto understanding the skills at hand. This anchor chart hung on my wall all year long and I also made a copy for my student to keep in their reading notebooks. Something like this can be revisited throughout the year. Also, when I pulled small groups I would model over and over again what this looked like. TIP: students need to see a teacher model these strategies.

Grab the complete set with all the posters here!

Reading Skills & Strategies

Here are some of the skills and strategies we focused that are helpful for students to understand and make sense of what they are reading in the text…

Reading skills we focused on:

• Main Idea
• Summarization
• Using Schema
• Author’s Purpose
• Plot
• Point of View
• Theme

Reading strategies we focused on:

• Making predictions
• Making connections
• inferencing
• visualization
• Ask questions
• Monitor comprehension

I created these Reading Posters which include many more strategies to help me in my classroom. These are great to display in the classroom, or print in smaller form for student notebooks. I love also placing them on a 3 ring binder and having them placed at student tables. You can use these all the time, as students need constant reminders of comprehension strategies.

Take a peek at the different reading posters to meet your needs!

Reading Skills Activities

Something I had not focused on until recently was creating resources that focused solely on these reading skills & strategies. I worked on these mini units for several months and the response from teachers was so overwhelming because it is something they really wanted to use with their students. I had so many love this set up and request more, so I created set 2 several months later.

This resource is a quick reading passage with the same set up for each skill. The students read the story and focus on the skill at hand. Having something consistent is so important and will help guide students while reading independently. Also, because many of us are in a hybrid or distance learning setting this resource is print, and in digital option.

Included in the bundle (however each set can be purchased independently as well). 

• Main Idea Passages
• Theme
• Context Clues
• Making Prediction
• Character Traits

Take a peek at a video of this resource.

Grab the Reading Skills Packets Here!

This post may contain affiliate links for your convenience. View our full disclosure policy here.