89 Scooping Phrases
Catherine Moen
Strategy Overview
- Scooping phrases is an activity that has students grouping words together into phrases. ” Children who read word by word instead of in phrases often struggle with making meaning from what they read” (Riley, 2024)
- Students can break these phrases down so that they can focus on how the words and phrases should sound when reading them. Students can make a scooping motion as well when practicing this activity to help with the visualization.
- Scooping phrases is important because it helps students to not just read one word at a time, but to read words more fluently which is the goal for when students are working on their fluency skills.
- Teachers can easily incorporate this activity into a literacy block by first explicitly teaching the strategy while reading a poem of text on chart paper or white board and then allowing for independent practice.
Strategy in Action
The teacher would start by teaching what scooping is. The teacher will explain that scooping phrases means that students are reading a few words at a time that go together so that they can practice not reading only one word at a time creating a choppy sound. The teacher will even show the motion of scooping by taking their pointer finger and making a scooping motion, like they are scooping ice cream. From there, the teacher will give examples like “the small mouse” or “the black cat”. These small phrases help students with grouping words that go together and as well as having them practice reading fluency in small chunks. The teacher will then ask the students “who”, “what”, and “where” questions based on what the phrase is saying. This allows for further questioning and works on comprehension as well. The students would then look for the next phrase of the sentence. From there students will practice independently by reading these short phrases and building the sentences so that when it comes time to read complete sentences, they will have had experience reading shorter phrases fluently.
