This month I read the article Teach Comprehension. In this article, it discussed the importance of teaching strategies that are useful when it comes to comprehension. It gave many different strategies that you could use to teach comprehension such as making connections, visualizations, questioning, making inferences, and thinking aloud. In the article, it stated how it was important to teach/use many strategies and not just one at a time. In 1st grade, we use a lot of these strategies already since students are beginning to read and rely on pictures to help tell the story. However, I need to work on talking to myself to aid understand and saying it aloud so that my students are able to view this process. During my read aloud, I plan on doing that more and in small group guided reading I will do it also but I will encourage students to do the same.
I believe this is the hardest thing to get the students to when they are reading independently because they are so focused on the reading part they aren't really able to fully comprehend the story and enjoy the book. Hopefully, by teaching these strategies this will help them become better independent readers as well and I look forward to seeing how much they grow as readers.
Hi Shaylla,
ReplyDeleteThis chapter is one of my favorites too because it opened up my eyes that it isn't enough to teach the proficient reading strategies to students, but that how we taught them were just as important. Teaching them in isolation where students apply them in isolation is inauthentic and it doesn't help students understand the complex, cognitive process that reading is. We can certainly discuss them individually but when they apply them we need to be explicit about explaining that students certainly employ multiple strategies as readers. Thank you! Dawn
Shaylla, how right you are--early readers do focus word-to-word so much that they don't always get the full meaning of the story. So, to build comprehension early, we must take the time to model the thinking process that goes on while we read. You will see your read alouds become think alouds; but that will be great for your students.
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