Reading Comprehension Skills & Strategies

This post is in conjunction with my latest podcast show, #24: Reading Comprehension & Extensions. More show notes on this episode can be found at: 
for-the-love-of-literacy.mailchimpsites.com/ 


Teaching Reading Comp. Strategies: 
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1. Set a purpose for reading-- why is a child reading something in particular? Should they walk away with knowledge of a person or a person’s life, a character trait or attribute, or a skill?
2. Summarize; can a student recite what they just read to you? Of course it doesn’t need to be word verbatim; we are not discussing memorization here. But if they can paraphrase what they read, that means they got the gist of it.
3. Model thinking aloud or unpacking your thinking. For example, you might say: “So this happened as a result of XYZ  & now we will have to keep reading to see what the main character does to resolve the problem.”
4. Sequencing. Ask the child to state what happened FIRST in the story, what happened NEXT, THEN, & LAST or FINALLY.  My students use to have a comprehension story string (pictures strung up on yarn) that they would hold & move along in their hands as they used the pictures to prompt their memory to retell part of the story.
5. Activate childrens’ prior knowledge & help them make connections. A text is much more powerful when a child can connect it to their life, another story, or the world.  This strategy is known as: text-to-self, text-to-text & text-to-world connections.
6. Identify new vocabulary while decoding the text. Help kids find a system independent of constantly asking an adult what a word means. (i.e. keeping a dictionary handy or perhaps having access to dictionary.com in today’s day & age, so that encountering a new word doesn’t keep them from understanding a passage or story they’ve read, & it also doesn’t discourage them from completing the reading.)
7. Ask questions during & after reading.  It may seem tedious to you to do this at first, but eventually, the child might start creating their own questions as they get excited about reading. Right now I think it’s the cutest thing in the world, but when I tease my son a little & hold the page before the climax of a story is reached, he’ll say, “Keep reading Mommy! Let’s see what happens next!”
8. Ask students to restate a main idea or lesson learned (Aesop’s Fables) from their reading in their own words. Again, paraphrasing is a higher cognitive skill, so you know a student has understood enough if they can reword a story correctly.
9. Teach reading strategies like reading with a highlighter in hand.  I did this a lot when I tutored students one-on-one & in small reading groups in my classroom, because I was teaching students that we had a purpose in reading; I would go over the questions before we read & then encourage students to highlight any sentence that sounded like it might help us answer the question.
10. Use graphic organizers or story maps to guide thinking. These are great resources for students to organize their thoughts in or even the flow of the story.