The Threads of Reading Blog » reading comprehension

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.

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