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