Teaching Reading Comprehension: Have you Though about Useful Reading Comprehension Strategies?

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Updated on: Educator Review By: Michelle Connolly

Teaching Reading Comprehension Strategies

Preschool Story Time | Know the Community
Reading Comprehension

Teaching reading comprehension strategies, have you ever thought about them and teaching your kid to think about the book before reading it? Reading books in general is important from an early age and giving the kids the chance to expect the story of the book and the things they will experience in it.

Reading comprehension strategies are all about summarizing, sequencing, inferencing, comparing and contrasting, building some conclusions, problem solving, self-questioning, relating the story to the background knowledge, knowing the difference between the fact and the opinion and eventually finding the main idea, the important facts related to it and supporting the whole story with some details.

These are the different elements that every parent should think about and teach to his/her kids when it comes to homeschooling them and while they are giving them the chance to know how to read books, not just in learning to read and spell the words correctly, but in the way they are supposed to think about that book in general.

Kids love to hear some stories before they go to bed but at some point they should also love the idea of reading these stories to themselves at some point. To make the whole thing of reading a book interesting, the kid should think about it in a whole different way and that is what reading comprehension strategies are all about.

Summarizing Main Ideas

In order for students to summarize the main ideas and paraphrase, they need to identify the important points in the story. Then, They can use their own words to introduce the main ideas. Understanding the author’s purpose makes it easier t understand the information.

Making Inferences

Making inferences about events is to know information or predict something that is not clearly mentioned in the text. This means that the students need to depend on their background knowledge to be able to make inferences.

Recognizing Story Structure

Students get to know how to identify the story structure. A structure of a story includes characters, setting, events, conflict, and resolution. Story maps make it easier for students to identify these elements. This leads to improving students’ comprehension.

Answering questions

Answering questions is an effective tool for comprehension strategies. It draws students’ attention to the purpose of reading. It also supports critical thinking strategies. It helps students to observe their comprehension. 

Answering questions is also a way for students to relate the story to their life. It improves the students’ abilities to answer questions. It requires students to use strategies like induction, inference and literal questions.

Using Prior Knowledge to Connect to the Text

Depending on students’ existing knowledge can help them better understand a story and identify its meaning. Their background will give a framework for the new information they acquire from the texts. So, they can recognize unknown tings faster and easier.

So, it is better to start the lesson with a whole class discussion. This will trigger the students’ minds to refresh their background information about this topic. 

Making Predictions about a Text

Guessing the main idea of a story before reading or hearing it makes children more aware when they read or listen to it. It also helps them to draw a picture in their minds about the surrounding, the main characters or conflicts and even the meaning of the text. 

You can help students with some information and clues to share their ideas. Then while reading they can identify the correct and wrong predictions. So, students can use their understanding to find out what will happen next.

Pass over Control by Asking Students to Retell Story

you can always ask students to gather their ideas and try to retell the story they’ve just read. It’ll encourage them to pay attention to the small details along with the meaning. They can use these questions words ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘where’, and ‘why’  to have the basis for retelling the story.

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