When teaching young students, it can be difficult to know whether or not a student is reading for comprehension. Being able to accurately read words aloud demonstrates fluency, but it doesn’t tell a teacher if the student understands what they’re reading. Reading comprehension is a more advanced skill and requires students to process and understand as they are reading.
Why Reading for Comprehension is Important
Once students have decoding and vocabulary skills, the next step in their journey is reading comprehension. Students need to be taught to connect the words they are reading to thoughts and ideas. Without these connections, a child can read an entire paragraph and have no idea what it was about. If comprehension isn’t taught early and properly, children can develop a negative relationship with reading and try to avoid the action altogether.
3 Tips for Teaching Reading Comprehension
- Create a Safe Space - Like all skills, reading comprehension will develop at a different rate for each of the students in your classroom. It’s crucial that they feel comfortable telling you when they don’t understand certain words or are becoming frustrated. Without this communication, students are more likely to fall behind or stop trying.
- Use Visual Aids - Visual aids reign supreme in all subjects, and reading for comprehension is no different. For younger students, it can be as simple as showing them a picture of an animal and having them write out the name of the animal. For a more advanced strategy, show your students a picture of a house or a slice of pizza and have them write a short sentence about it. These exercises will help your students recall words that they associate with the ideas and concepts they want to express.
- “Cloze” Task - This activity is a great place to start with students at any reading level. Simply choose a generic sentence at their reading level and remove one of the words. Ask your students to pull a word from memory and insert it into the sentence. It can be a word as simple as “dog” or as challenging as “hospital” or “helicopter."
3 Easy Ways to Check for Understanding
- Have Students Summarize What They Read - Once your students can read and conceptualize full sentences, have them read small paragraphs and summarize what they read. This is a great activity to do with small groups and can inspire conversations that further deepen students’ connections with the text.
- Ask Specific Questions - While your students are reading, ask them specific questions about what they’re reading. For instance, if they’re reading a paragraph about a man who is walking his big dog Spot, wait for them to finish and then ask them what size the dog was.
- Have Students Follow Written Instructions - A great way to check your class’s progress as a whole is to put written directions on the board and observe whether or not your students can follow them. Based on the complexity of the directions, you can gauge whether students comprehend the directions or need additional support.
Additional Resources
Reading comprehension is an important skill that your students will continue to strengthen and develop in every grade. A strong foundation in the early grades helps students to begin making important connections as they read and to develop a love of reading. For engaging printables designed to help you students practice reading comprehension skills, click here.
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