The Last Piece of the Puzzle

I've been learning about different strategies that children can use to learn the letters in the alphabet, how to put them together to read words, and how to put words together to read sentences. Comprehension of the sentences and books they read is the last piece to the puzzle!

Cause and Effect is a great strategy that teachers can use with any age. By choosing a story that has many different problems and solutions, such as Whose Mouse Are You? by Robert Kraus, the students can create a circle story in which they arrange the different situations in the book to see what and when things happen.

The Detective Game is also a great strategy that can be used with every student. Students can pretend they are detectives to find out what is going to happen in the book. They can act out different parts and continue acting past the part read so they can try and predict what will happen next using what they previously comprehended. 

Visualizing what is happening in a poem or story is also a great technique. After reading a story, students can draw the pictures that belong to the words. They can share what they drew with their classmates and explain why their picture includes the elements that it does.

Anchor Charts are something the class can make as a whole. The teacher can lead a read-a-loud, stopping in certain places to add ideas from the class to the anchor chart. The chart can have some topics like "Questions Before Reading," "Questions During Reading," "Found the Answer," "Inferred the Answer," and "Need More Information." 

Read-A-Louds are very important for students to do when they are working on comprehension. Not only should the teacher lead read-a-louds, I think it would be a great idea for students to do read-a-louds in small groups with their classmates. That way, they are inferring and questioning different parts of the books by themselves and learn how to do this independently. 

As Pat Johnson and Katie Keier state in Catching Readers Before They Fall, "We believe that all children, from the very start of learning to read, should stay actively focused on meaning making. For some average readers and for all struggling readers, this needs to be explicitly modeled and supported. We want all students to learn to think as they read." I think that by using the comprehension strategies mentioned above, each student will learn to think as they read! :)