Ask students questions about the review words they just read.
You may not think of review words as a place in the lesson where you can work on anything other than practice sounding out words, but by asking questions about the words they have just read, you can sneak in some comprehension and additional phonemic awareness practice as well!
For every question you ask, they will need to silently re-read through the words to find the answers (multiple repeated reading!), and you can also check that they understand meaning (or difference between similar looking or sounding words).
This will require a bit of planning ahead when you are selecting the words for review. You can include things such as:
- words that have related meanings (find two words that might describe fur: fuzz/fluff)
- words related to a topic (find words related to birds: chirp, beak, wing)
- words that have a certain sound (says /a/, start with /sh/, etc.), or that rhyme with a given word
- words that reinforce a spelling rule or concepts you have worked on (which ones use the flsz rule, are a certain syllable type, have a suffix, etc.)
Don’t place these words next to each other, you will want the student to have to scan all of the review words to search for which ones match.
Once they have successfully read all the review words, now is your chance to get a little extra practice in by asking questions about the words they just read. Have them to point to and read the words that describe or say or match whatever it is that you want them to find.
It’s great practice for them to have to re-read through the word list and think about the words in a specific way.