Chunky Monkey is a strategy that students can use to recognize chunks within a word that are familiar to them. Often times, difficulties with fluency impact reading comprehension. For this, it is important that children use strategies to help them decode unfamiliar words with accuracy and automaticity. Chunking words into digestible bits helps students with phonological awareness.

Students with learning disabilities tend to have difficulty with letter-sound correspondence, as well as segmenting and blending unfamiliar words. For this, it is important that students can retrieve information about language rules, so that their working memory is not significantly affected. This will allow students to focus on sounding out the word fluently.

To ensure that students can utilize this skill across the curriculum, educators should provide students with multiple examples of word families and continuously manipulate the initial consonant. This strategy can be used to show that the ending of the words remain the same. With repetitive opportunities to practice, students will begin to automatically identify word families. Apart from this, educators can remind students of the rules associated with blends, digraphs, and compound words and have students participate in a sorting activity that involves categorizing words based on common characteristics.

i.e., (hit, sit, bit, fit)

(sub, rub, tub, cub)

(chip, chat, chin, chart)