Reading Strategies

1. Context Clues - Are clues within text that help a reader to understand concepts, ideas, or unfamiliar words.

2. Making Inferences - Using what evidence the text provides to make educated guesses about something. You can use inference skills throughout your life. You can use these skill at work, at play, or make inferences in what you read.

3. Drawing Conclusions - This reading strategy is very closely related to inferences; however, when you draw conclusions, you use information to made a determination. For Example - If you were riding a bus and saw smoke rising up from someplace off in the distance, you'd first see the smoke rising and use your experiences to conclude that there must be a fire causing the smoke cloud.

4. Making Predictions - To make predictions you use the information given to you and your scheme or background information based on your experiences to forecast what may happen in the future or what may happen next. This is an extremely powerful reading strategy that can help you use clues that an author provides to make statements about what may occur in the future.

5. Summarizing - learning to summarize is perhaps one of the most powerful reading strategies that someone can master. In order to summarize, you need to know a few things. First, ask yourself what was the reading MOSTLY about? Usually just a few sentences will do. We call this type of summary, a BEST summary. Sometimes we need more than a few sentences to summarize something. In this case, learn to break down the information into parts and summarize each part with a few sentences. It's important to include the main ideas and any important information you feel is necessary. It's easy to get carried away, but remember that the aim of a summary is to give a much shorter explanation of a much larger piece of information!