Giving students the opportunity to make new discoveries on their own is a crucial part of any learning.

When learning to read, teachers need to give children the chance to aid themselves in order to build upon their independence. Personally, I have learned that this involves giving students more wait time to see how they plan on proceeding. The chart pictured is one I received at a training session for Reading Recovery. n the child side, it lists several behaviors that students need to e!hibit in order to gain independence and to help gain independence "#hildren need to understand that when they are reading independently, they$re working at their reading. They know it$s every reader$s responsibility to make sense of what the author has written% &Taberski, '(((, p. )*. Through the use of taught strategies, students need to be able to take charge when they come to a point of difficulty when reading. + child who knows that they have strategies can help develop their monitoring and leads to independent discoveries without the help of a teacher. ,tudents can feel pride knowing that they were able to discover something that used to be difficult &such as finding known information to solve a word*. When students are able to monitor for themselves, they are able to use another source in order to cross-check whether or not the problem was solved. This can also be used in writing because "Whatever the cause of the initial disconnect, helping the child understand that what he knows in writing will help him in his reading is important% &.ried, '((/, p. /*. n the teacher side of the chart, I can recogni0e several areas that I have used in order to aid students towards independence. ne that I use 1uite fre1uently is to encourage the student to discover on their own. To do this, a prompt that I$ve used is how can you help yourself2 The prompt is only used after the student has had the strategy modeled and has worked through it on their own. nce the child uses the strategy to help themselves, I always praise him or her because they took the initiative. This strategy was used during my pro3ect in hope that when I told my student how can you help yourself, that she would initiate the learned strategy to guide her towards attending to the first letter in an unknown word.