Reading Strategies and Common Core

While Common Core is supposed to teach children how to read academic texts by implementing reading strategies, missing from my daughter's classroom is an awareness of what strategies good readers use. So when I tell her "before reading the text, read the title and then go to the comprehension questions at the end of the text," Hannah says to me: This is not what my teacher tells me. This is very frustrating since I try to tell her what good readers do, but she fights me because she thinks I don't know.

Reading strategies are critical for anyone who is in school. You have to read long and complex texts, therefore, you need to know how to read and what strategies to use. So this summer, our focus will be on reading strategies so that she become a strategic reader. As Grabe and Stoller put it, what readers need to do is learn how to become strategic readers rather than apply strategies.