Reading Strategies for Math

At first glance the title of my post sounds like an oxymoron to me... But, in just the first month of this class I have learned that there is a huge number of strategies available specifically designed for math classes. This is so exciting for me as a future math teacher because I feel that a large part of students' struggle with math is not understanding what they are reading. They either don't understand the instructions, certain words or phrases, or an entire word problem. Having a list of reading strategies to pull from will be such a great tool to use. When I googled "reading strategies for math" I found an extremely helpful powerpoint created by a lady named Anita Barnes for a National Reading Recovery Conference. Her presentation is directed at math classrooms and has numerous reading strategies and ways to integrate them into your classroom. One strategy that I think is essential to solving certain math problems is "Draw Pictures". This strategy can be extremely helpful in solving area and perimeter word problems.  Another strategy I found was "Context Clues". While this seems obvious and something that comes second nature to many people, it could be very useful to a student who is struggling with something like vocabulary. Learning to pay attention to the context in which the word is in can assist in discovering its meaning.  "X Marks the Spot" is a reading strategy in which the student places an "X" by main points, an "!" to denote new information and a "?" for something that confuses them. This would be helpful in longer word problems to help the student keep track of things when there are so may words. I really enjoyed reading through this powerpoint and hope any other of my math classmates find it helpful as well! Here is the link:  http://www.readingrecovery.org/pdf/conferences/nc05/handouts/barnes_using_reading_and_writing.pdf