Comprehension is Key, Part II

Okay, so the summary of the article that I promised!

This article is about teaching kids (or helping kids use) strategies to build better reading comprehension (understanding what they're reading).  The article provides 7 strategies.   Here's the first 3 in plain speak instead of teacher talk!

1. Activating background information to make connections between new and known information: Sometimes when kids read they read without thinking, so they only do half of the work and only get have of the information.  When teachers talk about activating background knowledge, all they are trying to do is help the kids think about the things they know and relate them to what they are reading.  We talk about 3 areas to make connections in.  The first is text to text.  The point of this is to get kids to make connections between two different texts or books they have read.  This can include using information to make another text make sense or simply comparing and contrasting two different books.  The second is text to self, which includes reading something in a text and having it remind you or think about something that has happened to yourself.  If a kid is reading a story about a vacation, it might remind them of the time they went on vacation and the car ride was really long, for example.  The third connection is text to world.  This is when kids are able to make connections about things they have heard about happening around them and make a connection to what they are reading.  A good example of this would be reading a non fiction text about hurricanes and remember Hurricane Katrina.  When kids make these connections, they are thinking about what they are reading and understanding the text better.

2.  Questioning the text: This is when kids are able to stop reading, think about what they were reading, and realize that they either didn't understand what they had read or wished they had more information about what was read.  By asking and finding answers for these questions the develop a better understanding of what they are reading.

3.  Drawing inference: This is when kids can take their background knowledge and take the information they've learned from the text to make predictions about what will happen next and also to gather information that's only indirectly stated in the text.  A good example of this would be the book Officer Buckle and Gloria.  In the story, the words are saying one thing and the pictures are doing something just a little different.  A child needs to be able to put this all together to understand the point of the story.