If you visit my site often, you might recall a story about my first year teaching second grade. I had a student in my classroom who could decode any multi-syllabic word I put in front of her. I was tending to routines and procedures the first week of school, but by the second week, we were well into content that I would consider beginning of 2nd grade material. I gave my students a reading fluency passage, and we were going over how to time our reading, how to count errors, and how to record words read right.
I wasn’t surprised when this particular student finished before everyone else. I saw it as an opportunity to spend a little one-on-one time with her, and ask her some questions about the passage she just read.
I asked her about the characters, setting, and problem/solution in the passage. She had no idea. She was looking at me like I was from a different planet.
Prior to teaching second grade, I had taught kindergarten. After seeing the blankness in this child’s face, I knew at that moment that teaching emergent readers to decode and recite passages as fast as possible is worthless if they do not know what they are reading.
You might think, “You should know this!” It’s true…I should have. But, I, like many early childhood teachers, was pressured to get my students to read and write their sounds. I was pressured to teach them to blend, segment, and memorize their sight words. By the end of the year, we had test scores posted on walls with this data. My evaluation included a discussion of this data. Reading comprehension was not emphasized in kindergarten. Even if we did reading comprehension activities, it was NOT emphasized like phonemic awareness was.
Is phonemic awareness important? You bet it is! But I guess my point is…so is comprehension. In order for children to not plateau with their reading scores in 2nd and 3rd grade, (we all know it happens) we must start putting more of an effort to integrate comprehension during our reading block, and throughout the day.
Here are some practical ways you can help your emergent readers build their comprehension skills:
1. Understand the importance of background knowledge.
One of the most important things we can do as teachers is access background knowledge in students. This is especially important with our English Language Learners. We have to be aware of the language and cultural difference that may lead to different experiences. There are many different ways to help students to activate their background knowledge. Think about the text you are about to expose your students to, and how it might relate to something they have already experienced. One of the most successful ways I am able to do this is by talking about an “experience” that happened to me. When I do this, I get students raising their hands to share their experiences. The more prior knowledge that you can help your students to activate, the more they will be able to connect and comprehend the text.
2. Use metacognition when modeling reading and teach it explicitly to your emergent readers.
Metacognition is a fancy word for thinking about thinking. As adults, we often have to stop ourselves to analyze what is happening in the text. We do this without even realizing it. We need to teach our kids to stop and think about what the author or illustrator is trying to tell us. Kids need to recognize when something they are reading does not make sense, and they need to go back and “repair” their misunderstanding. Students need to see this process modeled out loud. It does take time, but they will pick up on it, and start using it on their own.
3. Familiarize your students with different text structures.
Text structures are expository texts are organized. Some examples of text structures might be cause and effect, problem solution, and compare and contrast. Text structures help students make sense of new concepts by retaining, recalling, and summarizing information they have just read. By understanding different text structures, students become more proficient in both reading and writing.
4. Plan for text dependent and higher-level thinking questions.
The key do doing this is to plan ahead. You might think that you can think of these questions on the spot, but it will never be as good as if you planned ahead. I found that when I spent 5 minutes writing my questions down for the next lesson during my prep, I would never have to worry about scrambling to come up with good questions during the lesson.
5. Develop fluency.
Regardless of how much we want to push this aside, if students are thinking about the sounds, or putting together syllables in a word, there is no way they are going to be able to make sense of what they are reading. We want our students to be proficient in their reading fluency so eventually they don’t have to think about reading and/or making meaning of words and phrases. Sometimes this can be difficult because there are so many components that go into fluency. I have always wanted a way to practice fluency while focusing on one phonics rule at a time.
Eventually, I couldn’t find anything out there I liked, so I created my own passages with targeted phonics skills for each passage. Each passage has a story with the targeted phonics skill. In addition, it includes higher-level and text dependent comprehension questions for each passage. Be sure to use the link below to learn more and see if this is a good fit for your classroom as well!
Fluency and Comprehension Passages Bundle
I also offer first and second grade Monthly Fluency and Comprehension Passages! Be sure to check those out as well!
First Grade Monthly Fluency Passages
Second Grade Monthly Fluency Passages
Third Grade Monthly Fluency Passages
6. Allow time for dramatic play.
Either your school supports it, or they don’t. Regardless of your administration’s stance on the issue, dramatic play is vital to early childhood development, and can play a huge rule in emergent literacy skills, including comprehension. Dramatic play provides an optimal learning environment because students are not stressed or pressured to perform in any way. There are so many ways to integrate dramatic play to the literature you are using in your classroom. One of my favorite dramatic play activities was to have the kids act out the read-aloud or story they read. Having the students use their entire body to act out the story gives them the opportunity to use the part of the brain that is is necessary for reading comprehension.
7. Summarize.
Summarizing is the ability to take large chunks of the text and reduce it to only the key points and ideas. When students summarize, they are focusing on the gist of the text and not the small details. Having your students practice the skill of summarizing helps them to internalize the key points of the text they read. This helps them to better understand and comprehend what they are reading.
I hope you enjoyed this article! Don’t miss out on joining our Primary Teacher Group to chat everything primary! If you would like more ideas from Education to the Core, be sure to follow me on Teachers Pay Teachers, Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook to stay posted with new articles, freebies, and ideas!
Absolutely! I totally agree with you!
Last year for the first time in years I came to realize (huge a-ha moment!) that the kids were missing out on the comprehension of the text! I teach EFL and really put a lot of emphasis on reading as I find it to be not only a huge tool in language learning, but it’s also essential!
Unfortunately for me, I realized my younger kids “cheating” during their reading. I did such a good job with vocabulary and fluency that they’d finish in no time, but it also turned some texts simpler than expected. The result was that they found no need to actually read the text in concentration, as they were able to find the answers simply by looking at the text after a first quick read. ARGH!!!!
This was happening towards the end of the school year so I knew I didn’t have much time to fix this, so I just started working on them orally, forcing them to re-read the text various times due to my questions. Needless to say, they didn’t like this too much, LOL, and I can, in a way, understand why.
I took the decision to fix this this year. Yes, I will work fluency, but I will also work on comprehension. My first idea was to use storybooks and talk about them – they’ll enjoy that. Then I thought of sequencing and summarizing – they’ll also like those. Finally I thought of making them work with different strategies, which they may just like hahaha.
As you can see, all of your ideas are there! LOL, I was glad to see that as I was reading your article – put plenty confidence into my plan!
Anyway, my plan will start as soon as my classes begin. I am hoping this will bring more reading comprehension to the class and also more enjoyment to the kids!
Thank you for your terrific article!
I’m disappointed. Yesterday I posted a message here and it didn’t get through the moderator. I don’t understand why. I wasn’t rude or negative in any way. On the contrary – I thought it was quite a nice post with maybe a typo or two seeing it was late night for me.
Oh well, I hope to one day know what the reason for that was. In the meantime, thanks for your article, it gave enough confidence to continue with my plan for this year.
Hi Carolyn,
No reason except for planning wedding that will take place in 5 weeks:) Hopefully you can forgive me. Things have been chaotic around here. Thanks for your thoughtful response. Emily
I’m sorry, I just saw that the message disappeared from the screen when I went back to check and simply assumed it had been rejected. I should’ve given it more time! When I posted the second one, my original one popped back in and I was like “OOPS”!
Please forgive me for being so impatient – it does get the best of me at times!
Carolyn
I loved your article and wanted to share it with teachers, but when I previewed the bundle I noticed some grammatical errors. I wondered if you could fix those, or whether you would appreciate some editing assistance. We all need someone to look over our work, since it is difficult to “see” our own errors (we know what we mean).
Please let me know if I can assist you, or if you make corrections and updates.
Sincerely,
LM
State Reading Coach
Hi Lisa! Feel free to email me at emily@educationtothecore.com. Thanks for your kind feedback. I would be happy to send it to you and work with you to get it right. -Emily 🙂
I loved your article! I’ve been questioned about why I spend time on comprehension with my struggling readers. I plan to link your article to all my responses from now on! Thank you so much!!
Puedo encontrar está información en español ???