Follow-Up Friday: What & Why of Comprehension Strategies
Happy Friday! We hope you’ve had a great start to the first of the school year so far.
This week our focus was all about what comprehension strategies are and why we teach them. Comprehending what we read is the GOAL of reading instruction. It is why we do everything else! Comprehension strategy instruction is one way to aide comprehension. Strategies are "ways of thinking" made clear through modeling and thinking aloud. These strategies happen in our heads mostly during reading so we have to stop during our lessons and talk about our thinking as we go or we have missed the opportunities to teach about the thinking that is occurring. There are many strategies, but we have chosen to narrow our list down to a few that are most common:
Visualize
Question
Connection
Evaluate & Comment
Monitor & Clarify
Summarize
Predict
Infer
As you pay attention to your own strategy use as a reader, you will find it easier to teach these strategies to your students. We give many tips and helps for you to rely on our thinking until you are able to pay attention to your own thinking. It is our goal for you to be deep thinkers and to then get your students to be deep thinkers, using strategies when they are appropriate and helpful to understand the text they are reading! Click HERE for our FREE Comprehension Resources Handout and we also have Comprehension Strategy Posters.
This week we also shared an idea on Facebook and Instagram for storing books in students’ desks giving them easy access to books at any point in the day. Click HERE for the book totes we love and use! We use a paint pen to label the totes with student numbers. We’ve used these for three years and they are still in great condition. What is your favorite way for students to store and access books they are reading?
Here is a fun way we used the totes on Back-To-School Night so students had books ready to read on the first day!
A few more items from our social media this week include a short video where we talk about strategies being a “tool” and NOT the end result - comprehension strategies are a way we get there! The second video discusses the importance of using explicit language during comprehension instruction with an emphasis on modeling and using teacher think alouds.
Let us know if you have any questions about comprehension strategy instruction! We don’t know about you, but we are excited to begin teaching the strategies as soon as we are done with PROCEDURES!
Next week we will discuss our digital phonics lessons. We hope you have a great weekend!
