Rereading familiar texts in our Reading Center

Why Should Beginning Readers Reread Familiar Materials?

   Rereading familiar materials builds beginning readers’ sight word vocabularies. Beginning readers are not yet able to recognize many words by sight and their letter-sound  knowledge is not secure enough to help them sound out words. Their word recognition must be supported by text that is predictable and memorable. As they read and reread the familiar books, either commercial or as you see here, teacher-created, beginning readers will gradually  remember words out of context as "sight words." Very soon they will acquire  a bank of words that they can recognize automatically at first sight and be able to use the decoding strategies that they are learning to figure out unknown words. Soon they will be reading text that they will not be able to memorize and will need to rely on their bank of known sight words and decoding abilities to read the text.   Rereading familiar materials builds fluency and is important for comprehension. A fluent reader reads with speed, accuracy and expression. Research shows that fluency is important for comprehension. Readers, who are not fluent, expend so much effort decoding words that they are not able to devote mental energy to understanding what they read.

Rereading familiar books provides beginning readers with a sense of success, which is very important while they are developing their reading skills.
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