Teaching Tuesday: Comprehension Basics

If you're serious about teaching reading comprehension, like you're an actual teacher or you're homeschooling, you have to read Mosaic of Thought and Strategies That Work. I recommend them to anyone who's trying to help kids to learn to read, but they should be mandatory for anyone who's teaching kids to read full time.

If, however, you just want to help your kids be better readers, you can just keep some stuff in mind. That stuff being the high points from the aforementioned books. One key to teaching reading comprehension is to do it while you read aloud with kids. Talk them through your thinking process as you decipher a new word or predict how to solve a book's mystery; chapter book series (like my beloved Harry Potter, or a classic like The Chronicles of Narnia) are especially helpful in prompting discussions like this.

Here's a quick and dirty guide to reading comprehension strategies:

• Making connections (known as "activating schema" if you have a ph.D in education): This is when readers are able to connect prior knowledge to what they are reading. This can be as simple as recalling a trip to a farm while reading "The Brown Cow," or as complex as relating Latin root words to the spells in Harry Potter. 
• Questioning: This is NOT answering the "so-called" comprehension questions that accompany so many reading "comprehension" worksheets. This is encouraging kids to ask questions about the text as they read and have them frequently pausing to determine whether their questions have been answered. For younger kids, you can use the pictures of a book as the jumping off point, "What do you think is happening in this picture? What do you think will happen next?" 
• Visualizing: Creating a picture in your mind as you read. One fun thing to do with kids is to read them a picture book without showing them the pictures, then have them draw their own pictures of the important parts of the books. Then reread the book showing the illustrator's pictures and discuss the different ways people can visualize the same words. 
• Inferring: This strategy extends questioning; it is how you find the answers to those questions. When inferring, readers might use context clues to find the meaning of a new word or draw a conclusion from the clues left by the author. Inferring also overlaps with making predictions based on what has previously happened in the text and/or pictures. 
• Determining Importance: Remember last week's comprehension trick? It was about reading the questions before doing the actual reading, so that you'd know what to pay attention to as you read. Good readers know their purpose for reading; whether it's to answer questions on a standardized test, learn about an historical topic or to find out what Harry Potter will do next. 
• Synthesizing: This is the holy grail of reading comprehension. To synthesize you must not only understand what you've just read, you must connect it to your prior knowledge (aka schema) well enough to remember it in multiple situations over time, not just for the five minutes it takes to fill in the bubbles on a standardized test. 

Do you feel slightly overwhelmed just reading that list? Now you know why teaching comprehension is so flipping hard. However, you don't have to discuss all these strategies with your kids. Really. You just need to read to them (even if they seem like they can read well on their own) and talk to them about what you're reading. Talk about your thinking as you read. 

Little kids especially are fantastic at making connections, but often we shut them down because we just want to be done reading Hop on Pop for the eight hundredth time. But if we encourage them to connect the hopping with the book with the hopping they did on the playground, they'll get into the habit of making connections before they even learn how to read independently. 

Teaching Tuesday: The Comprehension Trick

When I student taught, I had the "low" reading group. Also known as the kids couldn't actually read yet. This would play out repeatedly throughout my teaching career; I worked with the kids who couldn't read yet. Even when I taught second grade, I worked with the kids who couldn't really read yet (we grouped kids according to ability and kids often went to specialists or other classrooms for reading). My comprehension instruction was either done through read alouds with the whole group or through very simple lessons with my burgeoning readers.

Ironflower, as she has with most things, went from 0 (not reading) to 60 (reading well with excellent comprehension) in about six months with little intervention on my part. She did the same thing with walking, talking and potty training. But Lovebug, as with walking (but not talking), started earlier and progressed at a much steadier pace, again without much intervention on my part. Until I heard the dreaded words at our spring conference, "Lovebug's comprehension doesn't match his decoding ability."

I remember biting my tongue to keep from saying, "Oh, shit."

Teaching comprehension is much harder than teaching decoding. It's more like teaching a kid how to think. Or, at least, to stop and think. It is why kids with dyslexia often seem to figure out challenging words but stumble over a preposition like, "with". Those kids think well, so they comprehend well. Often, because learning to read has been such a struggle for them, they are more willing to slow down and look for meaning and ask questions. Whereas a kiddo like Lovebug, who started decoding well in kindergarten and thrives on completing tasks quickly, is reluctant to think about word meanings or to pause and reflect on what's going on in the story.

This (extremely long, detail-filled) preface is to explain why I haven't yet addressed comprehension much on the blog. It's complex. It's challenging. And I'm not as comfortable with it as I should be.

But I can say this:

There's a trick to reading comprehension tests that's worked for countless former students, Ironflower and Lovebug. Read the questions first. Then read the passage. Then read the questions again. Then start answering them. If the questions are multiple choice, make sure they read the questions and possible answers. Sounds simple, but it works wonders. Even if your kid is tested orally, encourage her to ask to hear the questions first. I used to test most of my students orally and they were allowed to ask to hear the questions before reading to me, though few of them did (even though I mentioned it like a thousand times on testing days).

Teach your kids this trick. A lot (most? all?) of reading tests include the most boring passages imaginable. It seems unfair to test comprehension on such lame text, like testing attention spans by how eagerly kids can watch paint dry. It's not going to radically improve their actual reading comprehension or inflate their scores; it will just help the current reading assessments be more accurate.