Reading Comprehension Strategies for Kids

Join me for a  look at reading comprehension strategies that will help your child grow as a reader.

This Reading Mama and I teamed up to bring you another collaborative series!  Together, we shared nine reading comprehension strategies to help your child learn and grow as a reader.

In this series you’ll find sample lessons, book lists, and other tools to bring these strategies to life.

What is reading comprehension?

The simple answer?  It’s understanding what you’re reading.  But if you’re teaching your child to read or a helping a struggling reader, you know that reading comprehension is anything but simple. It’s actually a combination of reading, thinking, and reasoning.

Signs that a child struggles with reading comprehension

• He doesn’t understand what the story was about.
• It takes him so long to read the story that he can’t remember what’s going on.
• He may focus so much on the details that he misses the main point.
• He can’t retell the story in a way that makes sense.

What is a reading comprehension strategy?

It’s a tool to help your child make sense of what he reads.  Imagine that your washing machine stopped working.  You call the repair man, and he arrives at the door ready to help.  But he’s empty handed.  He’s simply not equipped to do the job.

Think of reading comprehension strategies as tools in your child’s tool box.  Equipped with these tools, your child will be able to make sense of new texts.  Best of all, reading comprehension leads to a love of reading.

How should you teach these strategies?

1. Describe the strategy.
2. Model it.
3. Assist your child as he uses it.
4. Release your child to use the strategy independently.

And don’t worry – our series shows you exactly how to do this.

Check out each post for a free lesson and printable!

• Schema – Children active their own background knowledge.
• Making Connections – Children make personal connections to text using their schema
• Predicting – Students use their schema, along with words, pictures, and text features, to make predictions.
• Inferring – Students learn to read between the lines, making their best guess with context and picture clues.
• Visualizing– Students create mental images as they read poetry.
• Questioning – Students learn to create their own questions so they become active learners.
• Determining importance – Students figure out what’s important as they read fiction.
• Synthesizing – Students use their background knowledge and text clues to “put it all together” and make new meaning.
• Summarizing – Students put the story in their own words using important details from the book.

Have you seen our other collaborative series?

• Simple writing lessons for grades 1-2
• Preschool & kindergarten writing lessons

P.S. If you’re looking for a more detailed look at reading comprehension, be sure to hop on over to This Reading Mama to see her series introduction.

© 2015 – 2016, Anna G. All rights reserved.