Comprehension

When teaching children to read, we often focus on getting children to learn the letters, recognize words, sound out words they don't know. This, of course, is the basis for reading (recognizing the words and being able to speak them). However, we are missing a big chunk of this puzzle, comprehension. As we have discussed in our Reading Education class and read in our textbooks, there is no reading without comprehension. The end goal of reading is to comprehend, understand, and gain some sort of knowledge (whether new or old).

Chapter 7 of Classrooms that Work: They Can All Read and Write emphasizes the critical importance of comprehension and provides educators with ways that they can best accommodate students with this knowledge. In order to comprehend something, the authors explain that a student must first understand the basic structure of what they are reading. For stories, this can be fairly simple because students are very familiar with this structure. However, for non-fiction, informational pieces, this can often times be a more difficult process.

To best educate their students, there is a model for teachers which walks them through the steps that should be taken that first gives responsibility to teachers and then later to students.
The sequence appears as this:
    -I do, you watch
    -I do, you help
    -You do, I help
    -You do, I watch
(I: the teacher, You: the student)
This sequence can be very helpful for any concept or lesson that is new for a student.

Chapter 7 provides readers with 4 different categories of activities that can be used to focus on comprehension:
1. Literate Conversations- Open-ended questions to students about what they read, adult-like questions that allow students to make a connection to what they have read
2. Think-Alouds- Thinking aloud about what questions you have while reading, bring up the topics that you thought in your head while reading the passage to yourself
3. Informational Text Lessons- using graphic organizers to best understand these difficult concepts
4. Story Text Lessons- story maps (and other graphic organizers) to understand the plot, events, and characters in a story

Questions to Ponder:
1. How can we incorporate comprehension easily when students are at a young age?
2. What are some activities that you have had experience using that emphasize comprehension?

Below, I have included two different ways that teachers can focus and actively improve comprehension in their classrooms. The first activity (Pinterest), is a reading log that focuses on different aspects of comprehension depending on which day it is. The second activity (Pinterest) is a Reading Strategy Fan. The students could spend time making these themselves and then practicing the concepts that it addresses (predict, visualize, clarify, evaluate, etc.)