Product Components: © 2014, Hello Literacy

Product Components
1 Great Reader Strategy Card

-front and back, in color and in black/white
-full-size, half-size and quarter size
9 Strategy Mini-Lessons
9 Strategy Posters to Use When teaching the minilesson
-each strategy can be taught whole group in a mini-lesson
and reinforced as students need support in guided reading
and reading conferences..
2014, Hello Literacy
(laminate sheets back to back)

3|SIZE|OPTIONS
Color|&|B/W
Great
Think
look at the pictures
get your lips ready
s-t-r-e-t-c-h it out
find the chunks
read it again
hop over tricky words
Great
Ask
Does it look right?
Does it sound right?
Does it make sense?

Front
Front
Back
Back
Front
Front
Back
Back
Notes on Teaching Fix-Up
Rationale
When teaching students to use fix-up strategies, we are also teaching them what to do when
they hit the bumps in the road of reading. Reading is much like riding a bike, and the road is
much like the text; there are tricky parts like pot-holes, puddles, trash, steep hills and curves.
Helping students know how to navigate through these tricky parts of reading is teaching them
how to use and apply the fix-up strategies at those tricky parts. This type of strategy
teaching is more about the mechanics of reading and less about the comprehension of
reading, meaning fix-up strategies are ways to help students figure out what the text is
saying at the letter, word and sentence level, not what the text is about at the story level,
although we all know that readers keep the plot and characters actions at the forefront
when reading, but the focus of these 9 strategies is on word-solving. Part of teaching is
scaffolding, which means to give a lot of support in the beginning, but pull it away as they
begin to use it without suggestion or monitoring from you. Using and applying fix-up
strategies are the first important steps to developing independent readers. Independence and
agency in reading is truly the ultimate goal of teaching reading; we want students to be able
to read (decode and comprehend) text when were not around.
As you teach and support students to use and apply these strategies, you will also be doing
much of the self-monitoring FOR them in the beginning. As students begin to take
ownership of the strategy, you will do less and less monitoring for them because they will be
doing their own self-monitoring when they come to tricky parts.
What we dont want to happen is the teacher to suggest to the child what to do at every
tricky part because all that leads to is teacher-dependent readers who do absolutely nothing
but sit there when they have to read on their own, at home or on a running record. As you
teach each strategy, you can add that suggestion into your repertoire of reading prompts,
but after a short while of these suggestions, these strategies will become a habit of mind
when students encounter tricky parts. Eventually, your prompts may just become, What can
you do here? or Which strategy would you like to use? or Choose a strategy on your
Strategy Card. You will also want to reinforce the strategies after reading by asking
students, Which strategy did you use to solve the word ? or Which strategies did you use
together?
These Strategy Cards are a scaffold. At first, you will refer to them often, students will
have one, hold them, study them and use them during guided reading, independent reading
during Reading Workshop and perhaps, for at-home reading. But eventually, as students
become better readers, they will not need to card itself as the strategy use will be so
automatic and familiar, they will use them while reading without even thinking about it.
fix-Up
The children
blow out the candles
on the birthday cake.
fix-Up
Pictures and words in

text are designed to go
together, so look at the
pictures for clues.
#
Boys and Girls, today I want to
teach you that when great readers
get stuck on a word in the text, they
look at the pictures for clues about
what the word might be. When great
readers do this, first they ask
themselves, What is going on in the
picture? and next they ask, What
in the picture matches or makes
sense with what Ive already read.
Mini-Lesson Considerations:
When teaching students this strategy, you will want to emphasize how when
authors and illustrators or authors and photographers work together to write a
book. They talk and make sure that what is being shown in the picture matches
what is being said in the text. In books, pictures are a text feature that is used
to SUPPORT what the words are saying. Use the Strategy #1 poster on the
following slide to teach students how the picture and the words match and also
how if a student gets stuck on candles, but have read The children blew out the
? they will turn and look at the picture and ask themselves, What were the
children blowing out that I can see? When students are using this strategy, you
will want their attempts to be meaningful (M) ones where the strategy is helpful
to their understanding and not just a letter for letter match or mismatch that
doesnt make sense. For example, if a child looked at the picture and said cards
for candles even though the first two letters are the same, The children blew
out the cards does not match the picture, nor does that make sense of what
happens at birthday parties.
fix-Up
get your lips ready
Like a horse uses his lips

to find and eat grass, use
your lips to figure out the
first sound of a word.
#
Boys and Girls, today I want to teach
you that when great readers get stuck
on a word in the text, they get their
lips ready to read the tricky word.
When great readers do this, first they
ask themselves, What is the first
letter of the tricky word? and next
they ask, What is the sound that goes
with the first letter. And, last they
say the first sound of the first letter.
When teaching students this strategy, you will want to emphasize how even great
readers get stumped by tricky words, no matter if they are long or short words.
It is important to emphasize that just like the title of a book gives a reader clues
as to what the book is going to be about, words have clues and keys, too. Each
letter is like key to open a lock, where the lock is the letter, and the key is the
sound. The place to start when trying to unlock a word is the first letter. When
the tricky word is grass we get our lips ready by looking at the g and saying
/g/. If the sentence in the text actually said, Horses like to eat ? and the look
at the picture strategy did not help us, we say, Horse like to eat /g/ and
think, What do horses like to eat that starts with /g/. Great readers know that
horses like to eat grass and great readers know that grass starts with /g/ and
great readers see the g at the beginning of the tricky word. So, once you think
you have solved or unlocked the tricky word, try it and see if the word you think
it is makes sense and sounds right and matches the letters and the pictures.
fix-Up
s-t-r-e-t-c-h it out
Like a snake can do with

its body, readers must
stretch words out to hear
the sounds inside the word.
#
on a word in the text, they stretch it
out. When great readers do this, first
they ask themselves, What are the
sounds in this word in order? and
next they say the sounds in order, out
loud and slowly. And, last they listen
to the sounds they are making to see
if they recognize the sounds as a
familiar word.
When teaching students this strategy, you will want to emphasize how words are
more recognizable when we slow down and stretch the word out by saying each
letters sound or sound/spelling pattern. (This is an out loud strategy when
students are first learning this strategy. Eventually students will be able to
stretch out words in their head, but you will want to make sure students do it out
loud at first so you can teach, correct and scaffold their use of the strategy
until they become more independent with it.) When words are tricky, and its still
hard to tell what a tricky word is, even after using the get your lips ready
strategy, we have to keep going by saying the rest of the sounds in the word.
For example, if the word is grass The snake slithers in the grasswhen
saying /g/ isnt enough help to the unlock the word, readers stretch the word out
by saying each sound or pattern slowly like this, /g/ /rrrr/ /aaaa/ /ssss/. Readers
can stretch it again saying the sounds for a shorter amount of time and less time
pause between different sounds like this, /g/ /rr/ /aa/ /ss/.
fix-Up
find the chunks
Words are often like big

glaciers of ice, but we can
look for small chunks and
sail through the word easier.
#
on a word in the text they find the
chunks inside the word. When great
readers do this, first they ask
themselves, Do I know any smaller
chunks in this word? and next they
say, If I can read some of the word, I
can try to read the rest. And, last
they look to see if part of the word
looks like other word parts they know.
When teaching students this strategy, you will want to emphasize how words are
made up of small parts all put together to make one big part, very similar to the
iceberg analogy. If a ship is sailing through the sea and there is a very large
iceberg in the way, it is very difficult to navigate around or pass through it, and
this can be very dangerous for ships as well. However, when the iceberg is
broken and small chunks of ice and floating around in the sea, ships can steer
around larger chunks and sail through smaller chunks. This is what we want
students to do in wordslook for the smaller chunks that they can either unlock
or recognize from chunks of other words. It is important to also emphasize that
smaller chunks may even be real words, like and in sand or go in going.
These are easy keys to unlock words and we need to tell students often that big
words are made up of smaller words or chunks. Another example is finding the
chunks in words that arent real words, but chunks they know. For example, in the
word monster, the chunks are mon - st er. /Mon/ is a nonsense CVC word, /st/
is a consonant blend, and /er/ is an r-controlled (common) word ending.
fix-Up
read it again
After unlocking a tricky

word, we need to read the
word or the sentence again
all the way through.
#
on a word in the text they read it
again all the way through. When great
readers do this, first they remember
the tricky word work they did, and
next they say, I need to go back and
read this again all the way through.
And, last they read the word or the
sentence again, all the way through.
When teaching students this strategy, you will want to emphasize how doing tricky
word work takes effort, close attention to word details, and some thought about
letters and their sounds. This is a strategy that great readers do to not lose sight
of the bigger goal of reading, which is comprehension. This is a strategy that
readers use when they have successfully tried other word solving strategies but
too much time has gone by for them to remember what the word or sentence is
about. This strategy is about word fluency and sentence flow, which ultimately
leads to comprehension. Rereading is a strategy that breeds familiarity and
automaticity. Readers can either reread words, sentences, pages or entire
books, but especially have having done a lot of cognitively labor intensive word
work to unlock a tricky word. Decoding is cognitively taxing, and often leaves little
room for the cognitive task of comprehension. However, if a student worked
hard to solve the word sandpaper by looking at the picture, get his lips ready,
stretching it out AND reading the chunks, s-and-p-a-p-er, and its two minutes
later, then we definitely want them to read the word and sentence again.
fix-Up
hop over tricky words
Sometimes readers hop

over tricky words and come
back to them later when the
story makes more sense.
#
you that when great readers read,
sometimes they hop over tricky words.
When great readers do this, first they
try a strategy, and when several
strategies arent working, they say Im
going to hop over this word and keep
on reading. Then, they keep reading.
Last, they go back and try to read it
later when the story makes more
sense.
When teaching students this strategy, you will want to emphasize that being a
tricky word solver takes effort and perseverance, but sometimes, all the effort
and perseverance isnt yielding any results, so a reader must make a snap
decision to move on and hop over the tricky wordalmost an abandonment of
the word. In some cases this is the best decision a reader can make because it
doesnt slow them down and they are making decisions on the run. When students
read without adult scaffolding, they must be able to try strategies without you
with some success and hop over tricky words with continued reading success.
This strategy does not mean hopping over every single word. It also does not
mean hopping over it and not coming back to it. It means hopping over a word,
sometimes, two words per page, but coming back to read it again after several
more sentences or pages have been read, and the story makes more sense.
When a student feels page-after-page success with unlocking words, they feel
more empowered to re-tackle words they hopped over in the first place. We
must help students to know when to decide to hop and when to decide to stick
with it and try a strategy.
fix-Up
Does it look right?
After using a strategy and

trying a sound or word, ask
yourself, Does it look right?
Do my sounds and words
match the letters and words
on the page?
#
they ask themselves, Does it look
right? When great readers do this,
first they try a strategy, or several
strategies, and once they say a sound
or word, they say to themselves, Do
my sounds and words match the
letters and sounds I see written on
the page?
When teaching students this strategy, you will want to emphasize that unlocking
words or being a word solver really involves talking to yourself to help you
figure out what to do next. You will want to tell students that there is a little
voice in our head that is our thinking voice and its always on, and we must
always be listening to it while we are reading. Its the voice in our head that is
going to tell us to keep reading when things are read correctly and its the voice
in our head that is going to tell us to stop and go back when what we have read
doesnt look right, or sound right or make sense. It is our self-monitoring voice, it
helps us to not read an entire book wrong. For example, if the sentence is Do
you want to come to my party? and you read it as, Do you want to come to my
school you would want to ask yourself, Does the word Im saying (school) look
like the word I see (party)? As teachers, we will be asking this strategy question
for students initially as they emerge as readers, and we will also ask, What sound
would you expect to hear at the beginning of party? /p/ (Sort of like get your
lips ready but in reverse. We have to prompt to the strategies when students do
not use them. When students are not using this strategy they are making (V)
visual errors.
fix-Up

trying a sound or word, ask
yourself, Does it sound
right? Do my sounds and
words sound like words and
sentences we really say?
#
they ask themselves, Does it sound
strategies, and once they say a sound
or word, they say to themselves, Do
my sounds and words sound like
words and sentences we really say?
When teaching students this strategy, you will want to emphasize the importance
of really listening to yourself when you read. When emerging readers are
learning how to read, it is very important that they read out loud and word-solve
out loud so you know how and when to help them and when to let miscues go.
When students are using this strategy, they must do so after successfully or
unsuccessfully trying another strategy. Depending on what the student says, and
they must listen to themselves, they must ask if what they said as their try,
sounds right. For example, if the sentence is A white horse galloped into town
but the student said, A white house galloped into town or A white house
golfing into town and kept reading, then they are not using strategy 7, strategy 8
or strategy 9 (which we havent come to.) If a student is thinking, either in their
head or out loud, Does that sound right? Most students would know that a
white house galloped into town doesnt sound right or that a white house
golfing into town isnt how language is spoken. When what a student reads
doesnt sound right, we must monitor that for them until they are able to monitor
this for themselves. When students are not using this strategy, they are making
language structure (S) miscues.
fix-Up
Does it make sense?

trying a sound or word,
ask yourself, Does what I
just said make sense? Do
we really talk like that?
#
they ask themselves, Does it sound
strategies, then they listen to the
sounds or words, and they say to
themselves, Does what I just said
make sense?
When teaching students this strategy, you will want to emphasize the importance
of really listening to yourself while you are reading. This strategy is really used
in conjunction with strategy 7 and strategy 8 at the same time. These three
strategies are really the highest form of self-monitoring when emerging readers
are unlocking the mechanical process of reading. Decoding, other wise known
as word-solving or unlocking the letter-sound code, can be an intuitive process
for children that have already been exposed to a lot language experiences, but
for students with little language and phonological experiences with sounds and
vocabulary, what is intuitive and predictable for most, some students do not have
the language and background experiences to make predictable attempts at letters
and words, nor do they have enough experience with the language itself to know
if what they are saying sounds right or wrong. When lending support to students
with this strategy, it will be important to have lots of conversations about the
context of the words and how they are used in the story. If a sentence is, I
went to the zoo with my Mom but the student says, I am with zoo to Mom the
student is not using the strategy nor do they have 1-1 correspondence to match
enough spoken words to written words.
Does it make sense?
Does it look right?
Hop over tricky words
Read it again
Find the chunks
Stretch it out
Get your lips ready
Look at the picture
Class List of Fix-Up Strategy Use

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Product Components

1 Great Reader Strategy Card

(laminate sheets back to back)

(laminate sheets back to back)

(laminate sheets back to back)

get your lips ready

find the chunks

hop over tricky words

2014, Hello Literacy

Does it look right?

Does it sound right?

Does it make sense?

2014, Hello Literacy

2014, Hello Literacy

Notes on Teaching Fix-Up

2014, Hello Literacy

look at the pictures

look at the pictures

Pictures and words in

2014, Hello Literacy

get your lips ready

Like a horse uses his lips

2014, Hello Literacy

Like a snake can do with

2014, Hello Literacy

find the chunks

Words are often like big

2014, Hello Literacy

After unlocking a tricky

2014, Hello Literacy

hop over tricky words

Sometimes readers hop

Does it look right?

After using a strategy and

Does it sound right?

After using a strategy and

Does it make sense?

After using a strategy and

2014, Hello Literacy

2014, Hello Literacy

Does it make sense?

Does it sound right?

Does it look right?

Hop over tricky words

Find the chunks

Get your lips ready

Look at the picture

Class List of Fix-Up Strategy Use

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