Daaiyah Rashid

 

Overview

Teaching Comprehension in the Primary grades

What is comprehension?

Comprehension is making meaning with the text, understanding what is read or heard.

• It can be from written words as in a newspaper.
• It can be from spoken words as in a conversation.
• It can be from pictures as in a book.
• It can be from symbols as in Braille.

MindPrime,Inc. website: www.understandmore.com

 

Knowing Where to Start

• The first step to increasing comprehension is to determine where the reader is or what skills need to be taught. 
• Select the right reading material for your child.
• The materials should not be too hard or too easy.
• Use their interest to choose material.

 

Comprehension Strategies for Fiction and Nonfiction

• Prediction of text structure
• Activation of prior knowledge
• Self-questioning
• Making connections
• Shifting reading rate
• Inferring
• Visualizing
• Summarizing

 

Strategies to Aid Comprehension

• Predicting from title & cover
• Noticing interesting words & phrases
• Drawing information from pictures
• Noticing details in pictures
• Skim, scan, and review
• Re-reading for fluency
• Using context clues
• Finding topic sentences
• Using prior knowledge
• Defining vocabulary

Hoyt, L. (2002)

 

Checklist for Effective Readers

Effective readers

• Have clear goals for their reading
• Look over the text before reading, notice illustrations, headings, charts, etc.
• Activate prior knowledge
• Make predictions
• Use meaning and expect the text to make sense
• Understand whether or not comprehension is occurring           
• Make connections: text to self, text to text, text to world
• Create visual images
• Consciously use text features: pictures, headings, captions, boldface type, etc.
• Draw inferences, conclusions
• Ask questions as they read
• Read different kinds of texts differently
• Skim and scan to recheck information
• Locate information
• Adjust reading rate to match the demands of the text
• Make a plan
• Identify important ideas and words
• Consciously shift strategies to match purpose
• Retell, summarize, and synthesize
• Use a variety of fix-up strategies
• Read on
• Backtrack
• Context clues
• Make substitutions
• Look at word parts: beginning, endings, chunks

Adapted Pearson & Duke (1999) and Keene & Zimmerman (1996)

 

 

Family Activities

Many reading specialist who teach children to read suggest the tried and true method of practice to increase comprehension. The important thing to remember is to make it enjoyable so the child will want to read. There are games to play, joke books to read, and activities that are fun for children and adults. Let’s have some fun and get the job done!

• Support content area knowledge
• Cover key words with sticky notes and ask child to guess the missing word.

• Frontloading is providing information in the form of vocabulary and concepts to support understanding.
• To frontload
• Learn about something
• Talk about it
• Wonder about it
• Read about it

• Develop a word list with which children can become familiar before they read or hear a story.

• Give children the opportunity to write about the topic with the words provided.

• Try to provide a demonstration for the topic to visualize the words or concept.

• Use photos, pictures, illustrations, or drawings.

• Picture sort
• Allow children to arrange pictures in a way that makes sense to them.

• Word theater
• Pair children and allow them to use charades to act out the words.

• Word prediction
• Work in pairs to predict topics related to words.

• Wheel of Fortune
• Blanks are created for each letter in a statement or phase related to the story or passage.
• Give a clue before each try.

 

Resources

www.starfall.com   
This website offers discount books on comprehension from Amazon and provides a special section for parents with books and activities as well as special needs strategies. It was recommended by an ESOL teacher who uses it with diverse populations effectively.

www.readingA-Z.com  
This site has a wonderful array of guided reading, phonics, phonemic awareness, alphabet, and additional resources to aid in teaching strategies for comprehension. These books and activities cover fiction and nonfiction stories that can be downloaded. They even offer some materials in Spanish and French.

www.kidsreadingprograms.com  
This site links to rhlschool.com for reading comprehension. It offers free worksheets, original stories and poems, essays, and activities for elementary grade levels.

www.literacy.uconn.edu/compre.htm  
This site is a portal to many resources for reading and comprehension building. The other sources that are linked to this site vary in scope and level, but are all about reading. It is useful only if you know exactly what you’re looking for.

www.thebookworm.com   
This is an interactive website with a story and comprehension questions to follow. It has a graded reader series and is leveled for various ages and user friendly for children and families. The stories have audio, so it can be used by children with guided supervision or alone.

Herman, R. A. (2001). The Littlest Pumpkin. New York, N.Y.: Scholastic, Inc.
This seasonal book is about the anticipation of a little pumpkin and the excitement of Halloween. The pumpkin is left behind at the farmer Bartlett’s fruit stand/market. It isn’t until the mice come out to discover him that his dreams come true.

Yu, C. S, Kong, S. L, & Yu, R. W. (1986). Tale of Hungbu and Nolbu. Seoul, Korea.
Kensington Educational. This is a Korean folktale, and it has lots of intrigue for primary grades. The sequence helps children follow the story and learn a moral lesson. It is contrasting the life of two brothers; the older greedy brother and his younger moral brother who shows compassion.

I would like to include the classic fairytales and nursery rhymes because they are an excellent source of text to text connections for beginning readers as well as text to self connections which is important for comprehension building. Children will encounter these stories or variations of these stories for years to come. 

Goldilocks and the Three Bears
Little Red Riding Hood
The Three Pigs
Peter and the Wolf
Cinderella
Sleeping Beauty
Beauty and the Beast
Snow White and Rose Red
Peter Pan
Pinocchio
Jack and the Beanstalk
The Gingerbread Boy
Three Billy Goats Gruff
The Ugly Duckling

 

 

References

Barron, M. (1995). Ready, set, read and write: 60 playful activities for you and your child to share. New York, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Burns, M. S., Griffin, P., & Snow, C. E. (Eds.). (1999). Starting out right: A guide to promoting children’s reading success. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Cullinan, B. E. (2006). Read to me: Raising kids who love to read. New York, New York: Scholastic.

Fry, E. (1995). How to teach reading: For teachers, parents and tutors. Westminster, CA: Teacher Created Materials.

Hoyt, L. (2002). Making it real: Strategies for success with informational texts. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann