Keys in Burlington

Self-Cueing

Beth DeCoste
Fox Hill
Grades K-5

Oh, the power of a sticky note! Our intervention students have been using the self-cueing technique to strengthen their writing as part of the fluency program, Read Naturally. Although the original focus for instruction is fluency, the students’ ability to initiate and organize their writing has also improved as a result of using the self-cueing technique to find the main idea.

At first, the students needed support not only to identify the topic and details, but also to write a list of facts rather than complete sentences. I would like to think my mini-lessons and modeling helped the students create a bulleted list, but as I reflected, I realized they were motivated because of the frustrations they experienced in the moment of writing. They were frustrated when their sentences would not fit on the sticky note and when they had to rewrite the whole sentence from the post-it to the paragraph.

Overall, we have noticed that self-cueing has been a simple yet powerful technique for our students to use when writing in response to nonfiction passages. Below are a few student writing samples.