Presented By: Sarah Baker

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THE FISH STRATEGY MOVING FROM SIGHT WORDS TO
DECODING

• Susan D. Whitaker Michele Harvey Linda J.
  Hassell Tammy Linder Debra Tutterrow

• Teaching Exceptional Children
• May/June 2007

• Presented By Sarah Baker

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• Students with disabilities often have trouble and
  struggle with reading
• Where are their problems?
• Lack basic strategies for quickly identifying
  words

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Why?

• Something is missing in their processing
• Some children tried to sound out words letter by
  letter rather than using patterns
• Some children responded too quickly without
  really looking
• Some children just made random guesses

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• The most effective way for beginning readers to
  store sight words in memory is to fully analyze
  the sounds in the spoken word and match those
  sounds to the printed word.
• Divide words into the larger component of onset
  (the initial consonant or consonants) and the
  rime (the vowel and the letters that are after
  it).
• This works because the development of rhyme is
  one of the earliest instances of phonological
  awareness to occur.

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• Onsets and rimes offers a friendly route to
  phonics and decoding
• So when can students be introduced to the Fish
  Strategy?
• -good repertoire of sight words
• -look at whole word rather than just guessing at
  the word from the beginning
• -know initial consonant sounds
• -are able to rhyme words
• -cannot perform consonant deletion
• -appears most effective with late first to late
  third grade

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The Fish Strategy Find the rime(the first vowel
and the rest of the word) Identify the rime of a
word you know that ends like that Say the rime
(the word you know without the first sound) Hook
the new onset(beginning sound) to the
rime AND YOU HAVE SAID YOUR NEW WORD!!!!
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What is the fish Strategy?

• Students decode using onsets and rimes
• Students learn to fish for new words using ones
  they already know

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How do you teach the fish strategy?
Step 1 Pretest and Obtain Commitment to
learn Step 2 Describe the Strategy Step 3
Model the Strategy Step 4 Verbally Practice
the Startegy Step 5 Controlled Practice and
Feedback Step 6 Advanced Practice and
Feedback Step 7 Posttest and Commitment Step
8 Generalization
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• If the strategy is taught for approximately 15 to
  20 minutes per day, within 4 weeks students will
  be able to learn the strategy, apply it in words
  with rimes they have been directly taught, and
  move on to generalizing the strategy and begin to
  apply it with rimes they have not been taught.

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• The FISH Strategy enabled students to learn a
  systematic approach to looking at unknown words
  and decoding them
• Students enjoyed and had fun fishing for words
  and were excited about their ability to decode
  words they did not know.