As a teacher, you want nothing more than to provide your students with the tools they need to understand and retain the material they’re learning. Reading comprehension is a vital skill in every grade level, but especially 2nd through 4th grades where there is significant growth that can shape how their literacy skills will be formed over time. In order to ensure success when it comes to reading comprehension, there are certain approaches and strategies teachers must implement. Read on for all of our tips and tricks on how best to improve — and maintain–reading comprehension in 2nd through 4th grades!
Reading for Comprehension
So much of the early years of reading focus on foundational skills such as phonemic awareness and phonics. Decoding is crucial! But, the ultimate goal of reading is to understand what is read. Students begin to make sense of what they listen to and read from an early age.
Beginning stages of comprehension include:
- Activating prior knowledge: Readers think about what they already know about the story or topic.
- Previewing: Prior to reading, students use clues from the cover, title, and other pictures to get a basic understanding of the story or topic.
- Literal understanding: Students can identify main ideas, key details, and facts. In fiction, they are able to answer who, where, and what type questions.
More advanced stages of comprehension include (with student-friendly explanations):
- Inferring or interpreting: Imagine you’re a detective solving a mystery. Inferring or interpreting is like making a guess based on clues or hints you find. It’s like figuring out something that’s not directly said but makes sense when you think about it.
- Evaluating: Evaluating is like being a judge in a talent show. You watch the performances and decide how good they are. It’s about thinking carefully and deciding if something is good, bad, or somewhere in between.
- Synthesizing: Synthesizing is like being a chef in the kitchen. You take different ingredients (ideas or information) and mix them together to create something new and tasty (a new understanding or a story).
- Monitoring and Clarifying: When you’re reading or learning, it’s checking to make sure you understand and asking questions when things are confusing. Clarifying is like asking for help or finding more information to make things clearer.
- Summarizing:
- Summarizing is like telling a friend about a movie you just watched. Instead of explaining every little detail, you give them a short and simple version of what happened. It’s about sharing the most important parts in a shorter way.
Explicit Instruction
Explicit instruction provides clear and direct guidance on reading strategies and skills. Teachers or instructors explain and demonstrate these skills step by step, making it easier for students to understand and apply them. This includes providing practice with familiar topics outside of using text. Once students are comfortable with the skill and how to use the reading comprehension terms accurately, they can apply it to new information.
Diverse Texts
Expose students to a variety of texts, including different genres, formats, and media. This helps them become flexible and adaptable readers. A mentor text, or sometimes called an anchor text, is a book used to model, reference, and utilize as a powerful example of the comprehension skill. Mentor texts are often used in writing lessons as well (and the same texts can be used for both!). In reading, mentor texts serve as the focal point for applying the skill.
It’s crucial to have a wide variety of grade-level appropriate reading materials available. But, don’t forget to think outside the box! Using digital texts, podcasts, video read alouds, and graphic novels helps engage and motivate readers.
Applying Comprehension Skills and Strategies
There are many ways for students to “show” their understanding.
- Strategies Bookmark: Having a reference tool to refer back to during reading will help remind students of the comprehension strategies they can use while reading.
- Annotating: Annotating texts is one of my favorites! Even if you can’t write directly on the text, use post-its to label, respond to, and evaluate while you read.
- Graphic Organizers: This is my favorite teaching tool for comprehension skills! I like to keep a stash of graphic organizers for each skill ready to go and pair with any text!
- Depth of Knowledge Question Cards: I really love these for fiction texts by Leslie Ann but you could definitely make your own no-frill cards with just some index cards! Better yet, have students create the questions. You could even categorize them by skill level using different color cards.
- Close Reading: This is one of the BEST ways to deepen comprehension. Close reading incorporates repeated readings of a text with increased rigor each time. This is a great way to scaffold instruction and layer the depths of comprehension.
Discussion and Collaboration
Discussion and collaboration can significantly improve reading comprehension by fostering a dynamic learning environment that encourages active engagement with the text. Here are some ideas for incorporating more discussion and collaboration into your reading block:
- Shared Reading
- Book Clubs
- Turn and Talk
- Discussion Prompts
- Act it out
- Book Commercials
Improve Reading Comprehension
Reading comprehension is so complex! It relies on many different skills. Students need to first be able to read accurately and fluently. Next, they must have the ability to understand what they are reading, process it, and integrate the new learning with what they already know. With the right guidance from experienced educators such as yourself, your students have the potential for long-term academic success by mastering reading comprehension during these years!
Need resources to deepen your comprehension instruction?
These resources have transformed my teaching of reading. It has allowed me to effectively teach reading consistently across my whole group and small group lessons. With the flexibility of the materials and options for differentiating, I can use the materials with all levels of readers. The best part is having the materials in one place, within my reach, and ready to teach!
Find the Comprehension Kits Bundle here or check out these comprehension skill blog posts!
