CRACKING THE COMPREHENSION CODE, Part 2

Jeremy enjoys my Riddle Book. Did he know what a riddle was when he started the book? No. Did he know by the end? Yes!

Last week in Part 1, I talked about the comprehension challenge that our kids (and their parents) face and covered some basic insights. Today I’ll summarize those insights and list some strategies for helping our kids understand what they read.

Why Do We Read?

In last last week’s blog, I said: “What’s the point of reading? To decode words and learn 10 new vocabulary words this week? Or is it to go right to the heart of our children, to help them to love learning, to understand, and to comprehend? For this, we need to approach the task differently.”

What We Know So Far From Part 1:

• Struggles with comprehension in students with Down syndrome are common; a comprehension lag of 2 grade levels or so is typical and nothing to be alarmed about. We simply keep giving our kids reading and comprehension support and they keep progressing.
• Comprehension follows naturally when the child reads for content rather than for decoding.
• Comprehension is fastest and easiest when the child is reading material that is high interest for him/her. In other words, personal topics.
• Decoding is not the goal in reading; understanding content is.

The Comprehension Experts Weigh In

• Here’s a direct quote from two educators who wrote the book on reading comprehension (see their tome, “Strategies That Work, Ed. 2”), Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis: “Teaching reading comprehension is mostly about teaching thinking.” Let me repeat that. Teaching reading comprehension is mostly about teaching thinking. If a reader is struggling to decode words, she never gets to the “thinking” part. How can she? So that leads me into the first and most important tip for improving comprehension: Pete and Repeat. Read on…

Comprehension Strategies

• PETE AND REPEAT: This one is the King of Strategies. Here’s why: The first time through a sentence, the emergent reader is typically focused intently on just trying to read the words, period. If fluency and speed are poor, by the time the child gets to the end of a sentence, she can’t remember the beginning. This is natural. So have her immediately read the sentence a second and then a third time before asking comprehension questions or moving on to the next sentence or thought. This not only assists comprehension; it’s a huge boost toward fluency and speed.
• Use Sticky Notes: Stock up on at least 2 colors of standard sticky note (one for your questions, one for the child’s answers) as well as one or two colors of tiny sticky notes. After the child has read a sentence/paragraph/page (depending on reading ability), you write a simple comprehension question on a note and stick it on the book. Help the child formulate an answer, and take the other color of sticky note and write the child’s answer on it; stick that on the book. You can work through a book that way, or just a page, etc., as fits the child’s ability.
• Use the Smaller Sticky Notes as a Student “Text Code”: You can use the tiny sticky notes to quickly indicate “?” if something is not understood, or a star or checkmark if something is important, etc. You can go back over these later and get some good comprehension support going.
• Do a Picture Walk First: You can go through a book first talking about what the pictures might be predicting, getting the child involved and interested. Then begin to read it through. I’ll quote Harvey and Goudvis again here: “We can teach readers strategies for thinking and viewing the illustrations as well as through reading.” I want to add that doing a picture walk first, if it fits the book and your purpose, can help avoid what I call “panic eye:” your little student comes to a word she doesn’t know, and desperately tries to take a wild guess cuing from the adjacent picture she has only just laid eyes on.
• Isolate a sentence: For emergent readers especially, you can build hand-printed pages, one page stating a sentence, as, “Our big brown dog Buffy has six little puppies,” and the next page asking, “How many puppies does Buffy have?” etc. Make it large and stand-alone. And make those worksheets about something meaningful to your child.
• Color-Code: Following a story, you can create a comprehension worksheet that is color coded, connecting “wh” questions with their answer. As the child begins to understand that “wh” words in a personal story connect meaningfully with something they’re really jazzed about (pizza, etc.), eliminate the color coding, using the same information that was on colored comprehension worksheet. Here’s a sample of color coding, taken from my First Grade Bundle:
  

  Color-Code Answers with “WH” Questions

Parting Thoughts

• Make “Pete and Repeat” your child’s buddies. It will make a big difference. As Oscar Wilde once said, “If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.” (Guess that eliminates most college textbooks.)
• Until confidence and fluency are established, make reading personal and comprehension will soar. One blog reader, a retired classroom teacher and Reading Recovery teacher, commented: “I have said for many, many years that children who learn to read for meaning in the beginning will be lifelong readers and will have no problem with comprehension! Though it takes extra time to create self-interest books, it is well worth the effort…The more personal reading and writing becomes, the more your child will grow in literacy skills!”

Making Comprehension Natural

Isn’t it true that when an emergent reader is reading a homemade book about his favorite big brother, for example, he totally understands everything he’s reading and could answer any question about the text?

So let’s make every effort to encourage comprehension with high interest content, especially in the first stages of this reading journey, even if that means creating some books ourselves. It works!

“With all thy getting, get understanding.”–King Solomon, loooong ago.

That was great advice, and it still holds. Let’s go for comprehension!