The Threads of Reading Blog » reading comprehension

Making Connections – Seeing Relationships

The Weaver — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 23:15:58 +0000

Students who have difficulty seeing relationships may also have trouble drawing conclusions, making predictions or drawing inferences. Teachers can help students develop their abilities to see patterns and relationships by giving students many opportunities to classify and visualize data. Classification activities can be as simple as asking students to create a simple wheel with spokes to generating a complex concept map. Once students have organized the information, be sure to have them explain the relationships and why they organized the data in the way they did.

Increasing Reading Comprehension

The Weaver — Sun, 09 May 2010 00:48:17 +0000

A good way to help students think about what they read and increase their comprehension of the text is to use a method called Questions into Paragraphs. Developed by McLaughlin (1987) the QuIP procedure helps students think about text both before they read as well as after reading. Students develop or are given 3 related questions on the topic. They then respond to each question using at least two sources of text using an appropriate graphic organizer. Once information for each question has been gathered, students then synthesize the information and write one coherent paragraph summarizing the information. Once students are used to gathering, synthesizing and summarizing information to questions that the teacher provides, they should then be encouraged to identify their own related questions and complete the research, synthesis and summarization processes on their own. This is a great higher order activity that promotes not only deep understanding but higher level thinking as well.

Building Critical Thinking Skills with Questions

The Weaver — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 13:00:29 +0000

Want to get your kids thinking more about what they are reading and processing that text at deeper levels? Then a technique called Facts, Questions and Responses created by Harvey and Goudvis (2000) might be just the strategy you need. Kids of all ages can use this technique to think about and process the text they are reading. Students begin by reading a selected nonfiction text and then generating the facts they have identified in their reading. They write these facts on a 3-column chart with the headings “facts” “questions” and “responses” as labels for the columns. After writing down the facts learned, ask students to list some questions that they have about this fact or things that they wonder about. These questions are listed in the center column. In the third column, students write about their responses or reactions to the facts that they have learned. This strategy can not only help students think about what is important in a selection, but it can also help them process the information and think about related questions that they might still have about the information in the text. While older students can process this information on their own or with partners, younger children can also use this strategy when guided by the teacher as a whole class activity.

Reading Response Journals

KTankersley — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 06:00:01 +0000

Reading response journals can be a great way of helping students of all reading abilities think about the things that happen in a story they are reading. I like to use a spiral binder for this purpose. When students start a new text, they write the details such as title, author, publication date and so forth at the top of a new page. They then divide the page into 3 columns with 1 small and 2 larger columns. The first column will contain the page or pages where they read this information, the second column will be “the event” or a short description of what happened in this section of the text, with the third column labeled, “My Reaction to This.” To introduce journaling to your students, model your thinking aloud for a short passage and demonstrate how to record thoughts and reactions to the text. In addition to being a great tool to get students thinking more deeply about what is happening in the story, journaling helps students improve comprehension and participate in discussions about the text after reading.

Organizing Information and Linking Key Facts

KTankersley — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 06:00:24 +0000

A great way for students to think about and organize what they are reading is to make a bubble map showing the main topics of the chapter and then listing linking information that belongs to each category as they find it in the text. I like to have kids use either Inspiration or my favorite, free, bubble making tool from http://bubbl.us/ to have students build a relationship grid. Students put the topic in the center with linking bubbles for the sub-topics. As they find facts and information that relate to the sub-topics, they can either create additional linking bubbles or just put the key information under the topic heading. Students can quickly and easily see the relationships and linking information. Here is a sample grid that could be used on the topic of different animals. Students would create a different graph for each animal studied so that they could easily compare and contrast key features and traits.

Content Relationship Graph

Understanding the Characters

KTankersley — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 00:53:58 +0000

In our diverse culture, students bring their own culture to the reading experience. We can help students better understand the characters in the fiction they are reading by asking them to consider the perspectives a character might have rather than looking at the issues or problems from their own background or cultural perspective. Some questions we can ask that can help guide students in their thinking are the following:

1) Would you have felt like that if (event) happened to you?

2) How might you have felt (reacted) in that situation?

3) How is (character) different from you?

4) Since (character) is different in this way, how do you think s/he might have felt in this situation?

5) What clues in the story tell you how s/he might have been feeling?

This type of discussion helps students focus more on why something happened and also helps them learn to identify a different perspective from their own. This may also help students better accept different perspectives and reactions in their own world.