Comprehension ideas

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Home : 2004 : January : 25

Comprehension ideas
By Ally

I went to a seminar a few weeeks ago that concentrated on comprehension. The presenter had 5 different strategies. The first one, she called "connect" and she would read a story and stop every so often and tell the kids
what this reminded her of in her life (when she was a kid or currently) Then later, she would have the kids share their "connects" to varying stories.
The second was "visualize"...and again she would read and not show any pictures and have the kids create "movies" in their heads about the story. Then she would read for a few pages, stop, have the kids draw what they see in their heads,

then continue in this manner throughout the book.

The third strategies was "question" and that is similar to the above post...stopping throughout the story and modelling outloud the questions she would be asking herself as she reads.

The next two strategies are inferring and transforming. Inferring was described as teaching kids to use all the clues in a book to uncover meaning...like examinging the title, looking at pictures, word clues etc. And transforming was choosing to read books that have had a profound impact on you to show children how books can change people's minds. It was a great workshop as she offered book "gems" for each comprehension strategy...I have used other books as well but it is handy to have a reference of books that work especially well for each.

I have "taught" the first three explicitly and have used the inferring and trasnforming strategy more informally and have found them to be very successful.I have found that once the kids know the terms, it is easy to refer to them when doing reading in other curricular areas...to remind them that we are always thinking when we are reading.