COMPREHENSION
Thanksgiving Lesson Plan
This is a Thanksgiving themed lesson plan where the students demonstrate how to predict, summarize, and ask questions during the reading process.
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Seven Strategies to Teach Students Text Comprehension
1. Monitoring comprehension
Students who are good at monitoring their comprehension know when they understand what they read and when they do not. They have strategies to "fix" problems in their understanding as the problems arise. Research shows that instruction, even in the early grades, can help students become better at monitoring their comprehension.
Comprehension monitoring instruction teaches students to:
Students may use several comprehension monitoring strategies:
3. Graphic and semantic organizersGraphic organizers illustrate concepts and relationships between concepts in a text or using diagrams. Graphic organizers are known by different names, such as maps, webs, graphs, charts, frames, or clusters.
Regardless of the label, graphic organizers can help readers focus on concepts and how they are related to other concepts. Graphic organizers help students read and understand textbooks and picture books.
Graphic organizers can:
4. Answering questionsQuestions can be effective because they:
There are four different types of questions:
5. Generating questionsBy generating questions, students become aware of whether they can answer the questions and if they understand what they are reading. Students learn to ask themselves questions that require them to combine information from different segments of text. For example, students can be taught to ask main idea questions that relate to important information in a text.
6. Recognizing story structureIn story structure instruction, students learn to identify the categories of content (characters, setting, events, problem, resolution). Often, students learn to recognize story structure through the use of story maps. Instruction in story structure improves students' comprehension.
7. SummarizingSummarizing requires students to determine what is important in what they are reading and to put it into their own words. Instruction in summarizing helps students:
Effective comprehension strategy instruction is explicitResearch shows that explicit teaching techniques are particularly effective for comprehension strategy instruction. In explicit instruction, teachers tell readers why and when they should use strategies, what strategies to use, and how to apply them. The steps of explicit instruction typically include direct explanation, teacher modeling ("thinking aloud"), guided practice, and application.
Students who are good at monitoring their comprehension know when they understand what they read and when they do not. They have strategies to "fix" problems in their understanding as the problems arise. Research shows that instruction, even in the early grades, can help students become better at monitoring their comprehension.
Comprehension monitoring instruction teaches students to:
- Be aware of what they do understand
- Identify what they do not understand
- Use appropriate strategies to resolve problems in comprehension
Students may use several comprehension monitoring strategies:
- Identify where the difficulty occurs"I don't understand the second paragraph on page 76."
- Identify what the difficulty is"I don't get what the author means when she says, 'Arriving in America was a milestone in my grandmother's life.'"
- Restate the difficult sentence or passage in their own words"Oh, so the author means that coming to America was a very important event in her grandmother's life."
- Look back through the text"The author talked about Mr. McBride in Chapter 2, but I don't remember much about him. Maybe if I reread that chapter, I can figure out why he's acting this way now."
- Look forward in the text for information that might help them to resolve the difficulty "The text says, 'The groundwater may form a stream or pond or create a wetland. People can also bring groundwater to the surface.' Hmm, I don't understand how people can do that… Oh, the next section is called 'Wells.' I'll read this section to see if it tells how they do it."
3. Graphic and semantic organizersGraphic organizers illustrate concepts and relationships between concepts in a text or using diagrams. Graphic organizers are known by different names, such as maps, webs, graphs, charts, frames, or clusters.
Regardless of the label, graphic organizers can help readers focus on concepts and how they are related to other concepts. Graphic organizers help students read and understand textbooks and picture books.
Graphic organizers can:
- Help students focus on text structure "differences between fiction and nonfiction" as they read
- Provide students with tools they can use to examine and show relationships in a text
- Help students write well-organized summaries of a text
- Venn-Diagrams (29K PDF)*Used to compare or contrast information from two sources. For example, comparing two Dr. Seuss books.
- Storyboard/Chain of Events (29K PDF)*Used to order or sequence events within a text. For example, listing the steps for brushing your teeth.
- Story Map (19K PDF)*Used to chart the story structure. These can be organized into fiction and nonfiction text structures. For example, defining characters, setting, events, problem, resolution in a fiction story; however in a nonfiction story, main idea and details would be identified.
- Cause/Effect (13K PDF)*Used to illustrate the cause and effects told within a text. For example, staying in the sun too long may lead to a painful sunburn.
- Click here for more free graphic organizers.
4. Answering questionsQuestions can be effective because they:
- Give students a purpose for reading
- Focus students' attention on what they are to learn
- Help students to think actively as they read
- Encourage students to monitor their comprehension
- Help students to review content and relate what they have learned to what they already know
There are four different types of questions:
- "Right There"Questions found right in the text that ask students to find the one right answer located in one place as a word or a sentence in the passage.
Example: Who is Frog's friend? Answer: Toad - "Think and Search"Questions based on the recall of facts that can be found directly in the text. Answers are typically found in more than one place, thus requiring students to "think" and "search" through the passage to find the answer.
Example: Why was Frog sad? Answer: His friend was leaving. - "Author and You"Questions require students to use what they already know, with what they have learned from reading the text. Student's must understand the text and relate it to their prior knowledge before answering the question.
Example: How do think Frog felt when he found Toad? Answer: I think that Frog felt happy because he had not seen Toad in a long time. I feel happy when I get to see my friend who lives far away. - "On Your Own"Questions are answered based on a students prior knowledge and experiences. Reading the text may not be helpful to them when answering this type of question.
Example: How would you feel if your best friend moved away? Answer: I would feel very sad if my best friend moved away because I would miss her.
5. Generating questionsBy generating questions, students become aware of whether they can answer the questions and if they understand what they are reading. Students learn to ask themselves questions that require them to combine information from different segments of text. For example, students can be taught to ask main idea questions that relate to important information in a text.
6. Recognizing story structureIn story structure instruction, students learn to identify the categories of content (characters, setting, events, problem, resolution). Often, students learn to recognize story structure through the use of story maps. Instruction in story structure improves students' comprehension.
7. SummarizingSummarizing requires students to determine what is important in what they are reading and to put it into their own words. Instruction in summarizing helps students:
- Identify or generate main ideas
- Connect the main or central ideas
- Eliminate unnecessary information
- Remember what they read
Effective comprehension strategy instruction is explicitResearch shows that explicit teaching techniques are particularly effective for comprehension strategy instruction. In explicit instruction, teachers tell readers why and when they should use strategies, what strategies to use, and how to apply them. The steps of explicit instruction typically include direct explanation, teacher modeling ("thinking aloud"), guided practice, and application.
- Direct explanationThe teacher explains to students why the strategy helps comprehension and when to apply the strategy.
- ModelingThe teacher models, or demonstrates, how to apply the strategy, usually by "thinking aloud" while reading the text that the students are using.
- Guided practiceThe teacher guides and assists students as they learn how and when to apply the strategy.
- ApplicationThe teacher helps students practice the strategy until they can apply it independently.
Reading Comprehension Lesson Plan Ideas
http://readingcomprehensionlessons.com
Who, What, Where? Worksheet!
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Reading-Comprehension-Who-What-Where-1118957
This link is to the website that sells the book with this worksheet in it. It is beneficial to the classroom because it has many different worksheets that can be used for reading comprehension lessons.
Making and Revising Predictions
Character Analysis
http://www.themeasuredmom.com/free-character-analysis-worksheet-kids/#_a5y_p=1925671
Reading Comprehension Worksheets/Passages
Click to set custom HTML
http://www.k12reader.com/subject/reading-skills/reading-comprehension/
Reading Strategy: Main Idea and Details
Understanding Reading Comprehension
What it really means to comprehend text — and why reading comprehension and teaching it are more complicated than most of us think!
By Jeff Wilhelm
I've noticed that many books about reading, and specifically about comprehension for that matter, don't even define what "comprehension" is. Perhaps it's assumed that we all know what it is; or maybe "comprehension" is a slippery term that we have trouble grasping, or "comprehending," if you will!
Webster's Collegiate Dictionary offers this definition: "capacity of the mind to perceive and understand." Reading comprehension, then, would be the capacity to perceive and understand the meanings communicated by texts. Simple, huh? Clear. Now we comprehend comprehension!
Ah! A closer look at reading shows that this issue is much more complicated than it seems. Facile definitions coupled with the complicated nature of reading comprehension is what keeps us from understanding it fully, and from teaching it as well as we can.
Let me focus on a few issues to help explain successful reading comprehension:
Comprehension requires the reader to be an active constructor of meaning. Reading research has demonstrated that readers do not simply "perceive" the meaning that is IN a text. In fact, expert readers co-construct meaning WITH a text. The research base shows that reading is a "transaction" in which the reader brings purposes and life experiences to bear to converse with the text. This meeting of the reader and the text results in the meaning that is comprehension. Comprehension always attends to what is coded or written in the text, but it also depends upon the reader's background experiences, purposes, feelings, and needs of the moment. That's why we can read the same book or story twice and it will have very different meanings for us. We, as readers, are an equal and active partner with the text in the meaning-making process of comprehension.
What processes and strategies are required to be an active constructor of meaning as a reader? Again, the processes have been underarticulated. There is wide agreement among reading researchers that every time a reader reads anything, they make use of the following strategies:
- Activate prior knowledge, and connect the applicable prior experiences to the reading (if students don't have the requisite background knowledge about a topic, they will be unable to comprehend)
- Set Purposes
- Predict
- Decode Text — identify word and sentence meanings
- Summarize — bring meaning forward throughout the reading, building on prior information to create new and fuller meanings
- Visualize — see characters, settings, situations, ideas, mental models
- Question
- Monitor understanding — the most salient difference between good and poor readers is that good readers know when — and often why — they are not comprehending
- Use Clarifying and Corrective strategies where needed
- Reflect on and Apply the meaning that has been made to new situations
- Since these strategies are used every time anybody reads, if your kids don't use all these strategies, then these are the ones to teach them first. They have the greatest transfer value.
- We need to know HOW to teach these strategies and give them over to students (this is where the featured techniques of think-alouds and action strategies come in). Simply explaining the techniques won't suffice. Students need help in the process of HOW to do it. Just as explaining how to ski won't be sufficient to get a novice down the hill, neither is explaining a text, or explaining a comprehension strategy, going to do the job in promoting comprehension.
- These strategies are necessary to reading comprehension in all situations, but they are usually insufficient to comprehension. Readers of any text generally go well beyond these general process strategies as they use engagement strategies to create a textual world, move around in it, evaluate it, etc. As students get older and read more sophisticated texts they must also learn how to meet the demands of making meaning with new text structures (argument, classification, satire, definition, fable, etc.) and new task-specific conventions (like those to tip off a reader to irony, symbolism, unreliable narrators, etc.). A reader who reads a satire or an ironic monologue — or even a fable, for that matter — using only general process strategies will not comprehend it. She needs text, and task, specific strategies to notice that a text is ironic, and to know what to do as a result.
Finally — teachers of reading have another big problem. We are expert readers ourselves. That means that we literally do hundreds of things every time they read that are automatic. This automaticity means that we are unaware of what we are doing as we read. And all of the stances and strategies that we use are not made available to our struggling readers. In fact, our struggling readers don't even know they are supposed to be using all of these strategies.
The kids who most need our help are the ones who are the least like us. And the best way to help them is to take off the tops of our heads, to become aware of and share what we are doing as readers. We need to explicitly model what we do, guide and nurture them to do the same things, and then create situations that will encourage and help them to purposefully use the same strategies. I propose the teaching model of:
I DO — YOU WATCH
I DO — YOU HELP
YOU DO TOGETHER — I HELP
YOU DO INDEPENDENTLY — I WATCHAnother way of putting it is from the students' perspectives:
SHOW ME — HELP ME — LET MEUsing think-alouds and action strategies, two rich sets of teaching techniques, are ways of doing just that. See the Think-Aloud Stategies page for guidelines to implement them.
Popular Reading Comprehension Books
http://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/reading-comprehension