It’s important to remember that the purpose for teaching reading strategies is for students to take ownership of the strategies and begin using them independently from you. If teaching the reading strategies is boring to you and your students, chances are you’re doing too much modeling and haven’t handed over control of strategy use to your students.
At the beginning of the year, you will naturally do more modeling than you will later. Here’s a tip for making your strategy introductions more exciting give students some control of strategy use.

Instead of just keeping my strategy chart on the wall, I also have strategy cards which I hand out to students. I use these cards to introduce the strategies that we will be using that day and appoint individual students to be responsible to particular strategies that day. This way, whenever we stop to clarify that day, Maria has to be alert and awake and know that we’re clarifying because she is responsible for holding up the clarifying card.

Often students use the strategies without calling them by their name. So when someone stops to clarify something I make sure to have the student with the clarify card hold up the clarify card at that time.

This gets the strategies off the wall and out in the hands of students. It has led to an increased awareness of the names of the strategies and increased use.
I welcome your comments.

Here are some strategy cards you might want to use. Scroll down to Strategy Bookmarks.

A podcast of this episode is available.