What Other Approaches Do Teachers Use to Teach Reading Comprehension?

This past school year, my grade level team had five first grade teachers (one class had two teachers because they did a job share, and only one of them taught reading). One colleague and I used both the basal reading program and "The Cafe" for teaching our students reading comprehension strategies. We began using The Cafe in February and found that even with only four months of instruction, the students learned a lot of strategies and referred to The Cafe Menu daily. We can't wait to begin the program at the beginning of the school year!



The other two teachers taught their students reading comprehension strategies through the use of modeling, using the basal, reader response journals, and think-alouds. For think-alouds, the teacher cut out big thinking bubbles and wrote "I wonder..." in the middle of them. Then, she laminated them for durability and had the students use the bubbles as they were reading independently and reading with a partner to check their understanding and make connections. The students would have to make a statement about what they were reading or about what their partner was reading. Also, the students made thoughtful responses in their journals about the stories that they read. Sometimes the students had prompts to answer and other times the students were free to write about what they wanted as long as they made some kind of connection to what they were reading (text-to-text, text-to-self, text-to-world).

Our Favorite Reading Comprehension Strategies

I have taught first grade for the past five years. We focus heavily on reading instruction for 90 minutes every day. One of my favorite things to teach in reading is comprehension. My favorite reading comprehension strategies are activating prior knowledge and using graphic organizers. I love showing students the cover and pictures of a big book and asking them what they already know about the topic they are getting ready to read about. They love to share their stories! This is turn gets them very excited about what they are about to read, because they know they will be able to make connections to their own lives. Graphic organizers are great because it is an opportunity for my students to do something else they love-draw and write. Graphic organizers also serve as a great assessment. Graphic organizers can easily be differentiated based on the level of your students. Some of my favorite graphic organizers are Venn Diagrams, Sequence of Events, and the KWL chart (which helps to activate prior knowledge). You can find these graphic organizers and others at Scholastic’s website: http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=2983

by Shalini


I teach first grade and use The Literacy Cafe Menu to teach strategies to my students in the areas of comprehension, accuracy, fluency, and expanding vocabulary. Last year was my first year to implement the program, and I didn't start it until February. I am very excited to begin the program from the very first day of school to see how much further my students develop in their strategy use. Something that stood out for me about my cafe board was that my students and I had the most comprehension strategies listed than any other area! Comprehension is very important in first grade because we don't just want them to be able to decode the words, but actually understand what they hear and read. My students use the comprehension strategies when they are reading to themselves and when they read to someone.

Some strategies that I think have been very effective with my first graders are Make a picture or mental image, Ask questions throughout the reading process, Retell the story, and Check for understanding. A technique that I use for teaching "check for understanding" is making check for understanding hands. To do this, I make enough hands for pairs of students in my class and write "Check(check mark) for Understanding" in the middle of the hands. Whenever students are reading in pairs, the students take turns holding the hand and stopping the person reading to ask a question about the text, for example, "Did I just hear you say..." This is a very effective way to make the students stop and think about their reading. Anyone that is interested in learning more about The Cafe can visit the website http://www.the2sisters.com/.

by Sarah


I have found have found that centering my instruction around the study of comprehension strategies has brought a new level of excitement into my classroom. I always start my year with teaching schema or making connections. This is a strategy that virtually all my students are successful with and it builds their confidence. I try to fill my classroom with books of all types so that everyone can feel success with this strategy.

I usually follow schema instruction with asking questions. I love using a question circle to teach this strategy! I pick a book that I think will spark lots of questions with my students. We ask questions about the pictures and cover before reading and continue to ask questions during reading and after reading. We save these questions and they are a great example of how some questions help us understand what we are reading and other just get in the way of our comprehension.

Creating images is a great strategy to get the artists in your class involved! My students bring their Reader’s Workshop notebooks with them to the carpet for read aloud. As I read from our chapter book they sketch images that come to their mind. We do this throughout the entire book so that they have pages of illustrations that tell a story. I often choose a book that is also a children’s film (Holes for example) and show the film after the reading. We then discuss how the images that students drew were different from the images in the film.

by Kelli


I first start out with making connections when reading. By teaching students how to connect to text they are able to better understand what they are reading. Accessing prior knowledge and experiences is a good starting place when teaching strategies because every student has experiences, knowledge, opinions, and emotions that they can draw upon.

I then move onto visualization. When we visualize while reading, we create pictures in our minds. Visualizing helps us to relate to the characters in a text. We imagine what they look like and how they act. When children hear a well-written text, they can mix the author's words with their own ideas to create a visual image. The child adds his/her own experiences to the words to create a picture of the event. Children can describe these visual images or draw a picture to illustrate the images. When we first began practicing the strategy, students drew a picture about what they were visualizing when I was reading. We call our visualizations "Mental Pictures."

by Rachel


- Activating background knowledge to make connections
• The use of K W L charts are a hit with the kids. They love to list what they know and see what their classmates know. It gives me an idea of what kind of experiences I am dealing with. Often times I take out the W, if we are working mostly on the prior knowledge part.
• Think- Pair- Share- Students love getting together at the start of a lesson to share what they already know about a topic we are going to read about. It promotes discussion and seems to hold them all accountable to contribute.

-Creating Mental Images

• This is my favorite to teach right along with details in writer's workshop. Many of my students lack the details in their writing. When I show them how important it is for their reader, by having them paint the images in their head as they read, they seem to "get it"!

by Shelley

What is Important to Know About Reading Comprehension?

Comprehension strategies are conscious plans or sets of steps that good readers use to make sense of text. Comprehension strategy instruction helps students become purposeful, active readers who are in control of their own reading comprehension. The seven strategies appear to have a firm scientific basis for improving text comprehension.


There are seven important strategies that all readers must be able to apply to text in order to read and understand content. Students explore comprehension using a range of strategies that include monitoring for meaning, asking questions while reading, making inferences, determining importance, synthesizing ideas, visualizing information, making connections between texts, the world, and their lives and using sensory and emotional images.


In the last several years, more and more educators have been paying attention to comprehension instruction in the elementary grades. Teachers know that the ultimate goal of reading is to make sense of a variety of texts. Emphasizing only decoding in the early grades can lead to students parroting back text by the third and fourth grades with little understanding. Teachers also know the limitations of emphasizing phonics instruction without meaningful literacy contexts.

One teacher’s evolution of reading comprehension instruction

Year 1- As a new teacher I followed suite with the other teachers on my team and began teaching our newly adopted Literacy By Design-Rigby. It was one of the first programs of its kind! Rigby included reading, writing, and phonics. The reading program was designed around the comprehension strategies and leveled books were included for student use. Great, right? That first year I followed the program verbatim. Something was missing though. My kids weren’t using any of these comprehension strategies outside of Rigby.

Learn more about Rigby: http://rigby.hmhco.com/en/literacydesign_home.htm

Year 2- My feet were wet. Over the summer I read many professional books about the instruction of reading: Reading with Meaning, Strategies that Work, and Mosaic of Thought and I realized I was doing all the thinking. I wasn’t requiring my kids to do much thinking outside of my mini-lesson. Not quite ready to completely change the structure of my Reader’s Workshop I still used Rigby, now only as a resource. I slowly began implementing mini-lessons of my own. Some of the lessons came from my professional books while others came from great online resources. I was noticing a slightly difference in my students. They were beginning to share with me more about what they were thinking while they were reading. Lots of, “Did you know…?” and “I can’t believe…”

Online mini-lessons: http://www.readinglady.com/

http://reading.ecb.org/teacher/index.html

Year 3- This year I had an entirely new team to work with. We all made our goal to develop Reader’s Workshop lessons that would fit the needs of our students and help them read to learn. We followed the scope and sequence of our previous reading program, Rigby, and designed ten mini-lessons to go with each strategy. We also developed assessments that simply showed the thinking students were doing while they read. I was truly following a workshop approach for the first time! My Reader’s Workshop began with a 10 minute mini-lesson, 30 minutes of independent but focused reading time (books self selected) and ending with a 5 minute share. My students were no longer just sharing, they were inferring, questioning, and synthesizing.

What Do You Know About Reading Comprehension Strategies That Others Might Not Know?

Engaging students in reading comprehension requires a dedicated amount of time each day. However after students have been introduced to the strategies, had lots of practice using these strategies, they can be integrated into other subjects and activities for the day.


I have found that the best resource for understanding the importance and complexity of reading comprehension strategies has been the book, Mosaic of Thought, the Power of Reading Comprehension Instruction by Keene, E. and Zimmerman S. It gives a great break down of the 7 reading comprehension strategies. Reading this book gave me the insight of the importance of creating an environment in your classroom, regardless of age, ability level, or experiences, that fosters ongoing discussion about reading and thinking about reading. I also found that Making Meaning, a reading curriculum supplement is a good starting resource for creating that environment in your classroom. It comes with books, lessons, and ideas for teaching students from the beginning of the year how to think and share about books they are reading.

According to Mosaic of Thought each strategy should be taught in isolation and should be taught for several weeks. This gives students a chance to be introduced, exposed, and lots of practice before moving on to another strategy.

Reading Comprehension Resources for Teachers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_comprehensionia.org/wiki/Reading_comprehension
This Wiki is all about reading comprehension. Reading comprehension is defined at length. Vocabulary and reading strategies are also discussed. This is a great first stop for beginning teachers or anyone wanting to know about the basics of reading comprehension.

http://reading.ecb.org/
This website, Into the Book, is a comprehension resource for teachers and students in grades K-4. They focus on eight research-based strategies: using prior knowledge, making connections, questioning, visualizing, inferring, summarizing, evaluating and synthesizing. Behind the Lesson provides information and teaching resources for each strategy. The website also features professional development videos, lesson plans, video and audio clips, downloads, and more.

http://www.marin.edu/~don/Study/7read.html
This is an article for teachers featuring 7 ways to improve reading comprehension.

http://www.readingonline.org/articles/handbook/pressley/index.html
This is a great article on comprehension instruction for teachers.

http://www.keystoliteracy.com/adolescent/literacy/research-based-comprehension-strategy-instruction.pdf
This is another great article for teachers on comprehension strategy instruction. The article includes discussion on research-based effective comprehension instruction and strategy instruction for adolescent readers.

http://www.resourceroom.net/Comprehension/index.asp
The Resource Room has lessons and articles on comprehension for teachers.

http://www.readinglady.com/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=2&MMN_position=4:4
This website has wonderful comprehension resources for teachers from the Reading Lady. Resources include strategy instruction and *free comprehension worksheets for students.

http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=2983
This Scholastic website features many *free graphic organizers from Venn Diagrams to Character Comparison worksheets. These graphic organizers are a great supplement to any reading series to improve student comprehension.

http://esl.about.com/od/readinglessonplans/Reading_Lesson_Plans_for_English_Learners_at_All_Levels.htm
This website features reading comprehension lesson plans for English Learners at all levels.

http://www.freereading.net/index.php?title=Comprehension_Activities
This website features many comprehension lessons for teachers including comprehension monitoring, visualization maps, and prediction charts.

Assessment Stories

In our corporation we have very high test scores on ISTEP. This is usually corporation wide. However over the last few years, I feel like we have been tampering with a variety of assessments especially at the primary level. We began with giving a standardized test just in the spring. We found this to be unnecessary. We were not using the information for anything, but to give parents an idea of how they left K, 1st and second grade. We then moved to using it twice a year, first in the fall and then in the spring. This particular year the corporation ordered the wrong test. In the spring they ordered the Kindergarten version for first graders. Well of course students seemed to have made huge gains and therefore miss information was sent home. We were directed to just send the scores home. Needless to say we did not do that test again. We since have gone to the NWEA assessment as our formal assessment for all students. We do these 2 times a year. Sounds great, we can use the information to see growth and we can use it to guide instruction. However because it is done in grades 1-4, and ISTEP is done we had to move back the second test to February. So we now do it in October and February. Yes we can see growth and we can look for information to guide instruction, but there is not end of the year information to see the growth from that instruction in May. What does it really tell parents?

Along with this we got rid of doing a writing assessment each quarter. We now do one the second week of school and the second to last week of school. This is fine to show growth from start to finish. However there is not a common assessment that gives the teacher more direction in writing instruction. I think this would be helpful when taking our students to our intervention teams, if we did it quarterly.

For more information on NWEA testing visit the following website.

http://www.nwea.org/