"fifth grade comprehension problem"

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"fifth grade comprehension problem"
By Tabitha

I teach fifth grade and I know the one thing that helped my students who just couldn't comprehend is a high interest book and reading response journals. After they read a chapter I wuould have them retell the story. If they
couldn't remember..they had to go back and reread the story. I would also have them pick out words they didn't recognize or understand and look them up for better meaning. I would also break the story down and ask about the main charaters...the setting... the problem or problems in the story...how the charater or charaters solved the problem...and what the student would do different if

he or she was the main character. We also read a lot of the stories out loud together and listened to some of them on tape. That way all the different learning styles were being met.
Also let them illustrate their favorite characters or scences from the story and tell you why. My students really liked doing this. One other thing I did around the vocabulary was I had them make up stories of their own or write a letter using the new vocabulary. They seemed to like doing this activity as well. This works really well with nonfiction.