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Track Your Place While Reading

Tags

ELA: Reading All Ages Strategy

Skills

Attention Visual Discrimination Spatial Perception

Track Your Place While Reading

If your student complains about words jumping on a page or skips lines or words when reading

Teach It!

  1. Objective: Students will use these simple tracking strategies if they have trouble focusing their eyes or their mind when they read.
  2. Teacher Takeaways: Offer the following tips and tools (next slide), and help students experiment with and use the ones that work for them.

*students* Tips To Help With Focus While Reading

  1. Cover part of the page with a piece of paper to limit the amount of words you are seeing at once.
  2. Use an index card, ruler, etc. to help you look at one line at a time and hide the lines underneath.
  3. Use reading strips to focus on a few words at a time and increase contrast between the words and the color of the page.
  4. Tinted transparencies are similar to reading strips, but cover the whole page when the concern is primarily contrast.
  5. Enlarge or change font on digital devices to make it easier to see.
  6. Use a stylus when reading on digital devices to help you keep your place and so your eyes can focus on each word.

Why It Works (the Science Of Learning)!

New readers can be intimidated by too much text, and older students can be overwhelmed by large textbook pages heavy with information. Students who are prone to being distracted can go off on tangents when they see a lot of words. Other students may have eyes that tend to jump around on the page. Using a visual aid can help some students focus. However, if you have a student that does not have difficulties, you might find these strategies can be a distraction or slow their reading rate so you want to limit this strategy to those who will truly benefit.