Hi. My name is Chelsey Short and I'm here to help you with your young readers at home.
Here is our question: "Can parents help a third grader with comprehension? Our son can read a
story but he can't have a conversation with me about it. What do you recommend?" Comprehension
takes practice. I have a few strategies to share with you to help strengthen your child's reading
comprehension at home. Break down the story into smaller chunks, give a reason or a purpose for
reading, create some fun ways to practice at home, and practice looking back in the text for answers.
One strategy to practice is breaking the story into smaller chunks. Some children may just need
to retell details from one chapter, while others may need to start breaking it down by paragraph.
As they become quicker and better at recalling and retelling that information,
you can break the story into larger chunks. Some questions that you could ask after
reading a paragraph or a sentence might be, "What happened in the paragraph that you just read?"
"Re-tell the events in that paragraph or sentence in your own words." and "What did
you think about what you read? Was it exciting? Was it interesting? Why?" Another strategy that
I use in my class is to give a purpose for reading. Before, during, and after reading.
A purpose before reading might be as simple as asking your reader to predict what they think
might happen in the book, or even in the next chapter. Using what they know about the character,
you could also discuss what he or she already knows about the topic prior to reading the book.
An example of giving a purpose during reading is asking a question to be answered while
they're reading the next section or chunk of the book. For example, I wonder if the
character will continue to be mean or if they will apologize. Or, I wonder how long sea turtles live.
Giving a purpose after reading could be asking what the reader learned, if he or she needs
clarification to better understand what he or she read. You could also encourage your reader to
write down any words or phrases that they didn't quite understand and discuss ways to help them
figure out the meaning. And now I want to share a few fun ways to engage with comprehension at home.
One of the things that my students love the most is our CD questioning.
The way that it works is you create you take an empty CD.
You write down the "W" questions -- who what when where why. I also include "how" and "summarize"
because those are also really important questions to be able to answer for reading comprehension.
You stick it on a pencil. You could also put it on your finger.
You spin and whatever question that you pinch is the question that you create a question
about what you read and then the student has to answer the question. I also include a CD with
more deeper comprehension questions, such as "I shared a similar experience," "when
this reminds me of ," and then just to mix it up I include a "spin again." The students always love
when they get to spin it one more time. Another fun way to make reading comprehension fun is to
create a fortune teller. My students love this because they can use it with their partners
and they don't have to think of a question themselves. So some of the questions include,
"if the story had another part after the ending what would it be?"
"How do you relate to the events or the characters in the story?"
"What part of the story surprised you or interested you?" Those are a couple of examples
that you could include on your fortune teller. With any of these strategies that I previously
mentioned you can always keep a journal with the answered questions because writing down the
information helps with the reader's ability to recall and retell that important information or
important events. With any of the strategies you should also encourage your reader to look back in
the story for answers. For some children they think that answering quickly or with the first
answer that pops into their mind is better than looking back in the text because they think that
looking back in the text is an indication that they don't know the answer. But I think that it's
a sign of a strong reader. Looking back in the story is a strategy that I highly encourage in
my classroom, because it gives the child another opportunity to better understand what they read.
Encouraging readers to go back in the text teaches them to take their time when
answering and to support their answer with text evidence.
This is a skill that they're going to be working on throughout their entire education. I hope that
you start to see your reader's comprehension improved using some of these strategies.
Thank you. For more information about teaching reading, please visit www.readingrockets.org.
Reading SOS is produced through a partnership of the National Education Association and WETA.