Unconstrained and Constrained Skills

Unconstrained skills are learned over a lifetime.  These skills are never fully mastered because they depend on the text, vocabulary and situation.  On the opposite end of the literacy continuum are constrained skills.  Constrained skills can be mastered, no matter the situation.  The image below lists different skills readers use and classifies them as constrained or unconstrained.

In our delayed opening professional development, we handed out a list of possible intervention activities that could be used in the classroom.  Below are links that explain and/or model some of the strategies.  If you need a reminder of our presentation, check out the following link!
Intervention Presentation

Unconstrained Skills:

• Reader's Theater  
• QAR questioning 
• Exploding Moment
• Show Don't Tell
• Writing Territories
• Frayer Model
• Shades of Meaning
• Sorting (for content or word patterns)

Constrained Skills:

• Letter Naming Fluency
• Letter Naming and Sound Fluency
• Blending
• Phoneme Segmentation
• A little bit of everything!