It is very important for young readers to be able to comprehend the text that they are reading. If a student does not comprehend the text they are working with, then the student will gain no meaning from it and the readings will have no effect on them. The building blocks of comprehension are the ability to decode words, a productive fluency, a rich background knowledge, and an accurate vocabulary. A teacher can help push a students comprehension by asking general questions about the novel, creating activities to urge students to make their own meanings, and working one on one with the child to assist their reading abilities and appropriate text choices.
According to the readings this week by Gill, it is important for teachers to follow the comprehension matrix. The teacher should do prereading activities first. Prereading activities can include general questions about the topics that are about to be read or filling out a graphic organizer such as a K-W-L chart. During the reading of the text, students can fill out a reading guide worksheet during silent reading, or the teacher can have students read a part of the reading silently and then discuss that section as a class. In order to ensure comprehension, postreading activities such as making a timeline of the event, a newspaper report, a letter, a diary entry, a poem, a fake newscast, or anything else that requires using the knowledge they've accumulated to form something new can be used.
This video shows a basic way to help students with
comprehension: questions.
The basic idea of comprehension is that the student understands what they are reading, and that the student is not just mindlessly paddling through.
What would you do in your classroom to ensure reading comprehension?
How important is good comprehension skills to the future lives of your students?
In the readings this week from Classrooms That Work, fluency is described as a child's ability to not only read and comprehend, but to do it at a fast enough rate that reading is not pain staking. A child with a problem in fluency will be required to read at a much slower rate which causes a disheartening look on their reading. As a teacher, it is important to teach fluency to your children. The texts of teaching this using modeling, word walls, echoing the teacher's readings, children picking books that are easy enough as well as interesting to them, and a lot of student practice.
Here is an example of what have a fluency deficient feels like:
Well all the examples that the text gave to help with fluency, I paid a lot of attention to teaching fluency to children with learning disabilities or in special education classrooms seeing as that I am going to be a special education classroom. It is a lot more difficult to teach fluency to these types of students because actually decoding the word is very difficult. The solution provided is very easy, repetitive passages. As the teacher, you must select passages that are relatively short and simple. As a class, you practice one passage out loud. After some practice as a whole, the students are split into pairs where they recite the passage at least three times with a good fluency. The passage can also be recited in front of a faculty member. After time is spent practicing all throughout the school day, the students are sent home with the passage and told to recite the passage with the fluency they've worked on to anyone that will listen. The next day the passage is reviewed again, and then the class moves on to a new passage for the day. This seems a very practical and simple way to increase your child's fluency.
What ways would you teach fluency in your class?
Why do you think that learning fluency is so important to young readers?
Although some parts of the video are hard to hear/understand, here is an example of an activity to work on fluency.
Reading and spelling are known to go hand in hand in learning literacy. Research shows that once a child knows how to spell a word the chance that they will be able to read it is greatly increased. So how can teachers make their students better spellers? A great tool to use in the classroom to help a child's spelling is the making words game, as shown below.
This game will greatly advance the student's ability to read and write. Children have a really fun time playing these games and learning the different spelling patterns. The lessons that are learned in the making words lesson will transfer over to the student's abilities to decode and therefore read more and more words. This activity is also very interactive and takes up very little time in the school day. However, the instructor needs to be sure to keep it interesting and keep the slower paced students involved. It is recommended that when asking students what letters spell a word, to call on the slower paced students during the easier words and the advanced students when the words become difficult. Do you think that you will use the making words activity in your future classrooms? Why or why not? Do you think there are any possible variations to the activity to keep things fresh and interesting?
Here's an example of a possible Making Words activity sheet that I got from
