Ch. 8 (“Teach Comprehension”) from Reading
Essentials: The Specifics You Need to
Teach Reading Well
It seems so much time is spent teaching phonics and word
attack skills. It is crucial that we
make a conscious decision to teach kids how to process and understand what they
are reading. The author makes a
wonderful point when she states that we need to teach comprehension as soon as
kids enter preschool instead of waiting until third grade. It is definitely too late by that time. We have so many students who come to us
lacking the background and prior knowledge needed to become “good” readers so
it is up to us to fill in the gaps. The
author goes on to make an excellent point that teaching comprehension skills in
isolation does not help students. I have
been guilty of doing this very thing. One strategy that I definitely need to spend
more time modeling is the rereading strategy.
I think I need to model that more for my students. I make a deliberate decision about modeling
writing for my students, but I too often forget to model how to read for my
students. It is as equally important as
modeling writing. Because of our STEAM
initiative, I feel I am doing a better job of having my students ask questions
and communicating with their peers.
Sometimes our students can be better teachers than we can so we need to
allow them that chance to communicate with each other about what they are
reading. There are many great
strategies in this chapter that will better enable me to teach reading
comprehension to my students.
Karen, you are doing a great job of allowing your students to communicate. I loved your statement of how students can sometimes be better teachers than we can. This can be integrated into your hope to model more reading for your students. You can incorporate students exemplars to model how they read. I'd love to see how this type of ownership might lead to more reading in your room.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of teaching comprehension strategies in isolation, I'm equally as guilty. In the trainings I've attended this year, I can see that modeling and explicitly telling students how all of the strategies combine to lead to comprehension brings about better results. In the end, I'm glad that you see the need stated in the text to teach comprehension along with decoding in the early grades. I've seen a great improvement in classrooms this year and can't wait to see how this focus will play out as students progress to the upper grades.
Hi Karen,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you and with Routman that comprehension is the goal of reading and if meaning is our goal we have to make sure that it isn't lost or replaced with isolated skill and drill. I appreciate the ways you work to build comprehension with your reading instruction.