Comprehension – How Comprehension Reading Can Become Easy for K8

11 min read
Comprehension – How Comprehension Reading Can Become Easy for K8

Comprehension reading is an essential part of learning, especially when it comes to developing reading, understanding, memorization, and other similar skills. What impacts their reading comprehension the most is their learning method and how you teach them to read comprehension per se.

Comprehension generally refers to the extraction of viable meaning and knowledge from a given set of data, i.e., usually text and diagrams (flowcharts, pictures, narrative maps, etc.). What many experienced readers fail to acknowledge is that comprehension requires strategies and interaction at the same time. It means that they should not only read the text passively but also learn to analyze and internalize it. At the same time, they develop it forms in their own understanding.

The basic order of teaching developing learners and comprehension readers involves gaining proficiency, understanding explicit instructions, and forming strategies to understand entire comprehensions.

Importance of Reading Comprehension

Does it mean anything if a child can read words but not extract the meaning from them? Recognizing words is fun and important but not understanding what the words mean is a great setback in the learning process.

Comprehension refers to the meaning of what is read. Comprehension implies that when a child reads a passage, they should be able to explain and understand the meaning of words and sentences. Not just individually, but form a combined idea of what the comprehension is about. Overall, without comprehension reading skills, developing learners cannot progress further effectively.

Examples of Children Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension is not only important in learning English Language but other subjects as well. For the survival of the basic education system, comprehension is extremely vital. If a child cannot understand what a Math word problem means after reading it all, then they might not be able to solve it and explain the reasons for answers.

Here are some examples of how comprehension reading is important for every child and English learners’ academic career:

Mathematics

Word problem is the first thing that comes to mind when we talk about reading comprehensions in mathematics. Without understanding what the word problem demands, a child might not be able to support enough understanding to solve the problem correctly. In simple words, they will not know what the question is about and what the answer has to be.

Science

Science is the name of endless sub-branches and sub-divisions. From chemistry to physics to social studies, science consists of all. Comprehension reading helps children learn and understand the facts, formulas, and calculations when learning about animals, plants, scientific methods, Solar systems, and more.

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​What are the Effective Strategies of Reading Comprehension?

Comprehension begins way before a kid is able to read text. It begins with recognizing images and what sound relates to them. Surely you might know how a child learns the alphabet. Learning through the images and knowing a picture means “A” and “B” is comprehension.

This is the core concept of comprehension reading. After seeing pictures and listening to words, they start to form a sense of what they are hearing. Hence, they are able to extract information from it in order to preserve knowledge and know what’s written or said.

Learning comprehension can be easy for a child if you are procuring the right tools, guides, support, and teaching material. From workbooks for all subjects to modeling, practice, and generating feedback, it requires different strategies of reading and learning comprehension.

Importantly, using multi-functional EdTech resources can help you gain an advantage in teaching children comprehension reading. Educational videos, workbooks, quizzes, questions/answers, and more can help a child on their journey to becoming active readers.

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Summarizing and Identification of Core Ideas

One way of approaching comprehension reading is to identify the main concept and core idea of the passage/text itself. Students have to point out important details and lay them out in their own words to realize what is important and what isn’t.

Use of Predictions

Predictions are a fun and convenient way of learning comprehension reading. When a child reads the text and starts to understand it, they form expectations regarding what’s going to come next. This hits their prior knowledge (regarding similar topics), and therefore, they are able to mentally revise predictions after reading the information.

Previewing/Use of Prior Knowledge

The use of prior knowledge involves making connections to previous experiences and knowledge. This is information that the student might already have. While reading comprehension, a child will be able to preview and make connections of their own experience with the story. Thus, they are able to make better sense of what they are reading.

The previewing of previous experiences could include connection with events, animals, places, and words. For instance, a child might know the meaning of ball by playing football with their friends. So, when they read about a football match, their prior knowledge of “football” will reflect on what they understand from the comprehension.

Another example could include learning and memorizing the meaning of difficult vocabulary prior to reading a comprehension that contains them. When the child reads the comprehension, they are able to make the connection to their experience and understand the meaning of the text.

Generating Interferences

Generating interferences while reading comprehension means drawing clues from what they have read already. This also involves the use of prior knowledge.

Cross-Questioning

Quick question answers strategy is one of the most successful ways that kids learn the meaning behind the text. As a teacher, you should model the perfect questions and strategies for answers to find the meaning behind the text.

Use of Visualization

Visualization involves recreating and imagining while reading. It is common for children who imagine and visualize to have a better recall in comparison to those who don’t. Often, the description and detail in the passages and text aid in visualization.

Comprehension Reading Strategies for Narrative Text

Narrative text commonly refers to stories, either fictional or true. Reading narrative comprehension can benefit from numerous strategies.

Story Mapping

Story mapping is a great strategy to aid in the understanding of the narrative text. Producing pictures, illustrations, and other sorts of diagrams helps construct the story structure the author might be using. Here’s what a typical story mapping strategy might look like:

  • Theme (the idea that the author wants to share)
  • Plot (storyline of the text)
  • Setting (course of the entire story)
  • Characters (people, animals, plants, and other elements that are in the story)
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Use of Predictions

For instance, when reading a narrative, the teacher can ask the student what their prediction for the text is after viewing the title. Hence, previewing, visualization, and other useful tips might help them form the right answer and comprehension skills. Further, the teacher can also inquire what text makes the student think that their prediction is either accurate or inaccurate.

Comprehension Q/A

coping with other comprehension strategies can easily participate in Q/A. Asking the right questions and then using prior knowledge or literal meaning of the text, the students will be able to infer the right answers.

Restating

You can even make the comprehension reading fun and enjoyable by asking a student to retell the story in their own words. This will help them identify and remember important text while using supporting details as they recreate the narrative.

Reading Comprehension Strategies for Expository Text

The expository text refers to the explanation of concepts and facts. Their goal is to inform, persuade, and/or educate. You can find various online EdTech resources willing to share different forms of comprehension reading strategies and methods through narratives, expository texts, and more.

You can get award-winning educational services for your children on monthly subscriptions. This may lead to endless workbooks, worksheets, quizzes, tests, video explanations, tutorials, and more.

Learning the Structure of Expository Text

The expository text carries a formal structure, which includes headings, subheadings, and even the first sentence of a paragraph as a brief summary of what follows next. It is typically visual cues and information of the text’s structure.

Here’s the typical expository text structure that helps children identify the relationship between the direction of the text and the core ideas:

  • Description
  • Cause/Effect
  • Compare/Contrast
  • Problem/Solution
  • Time Order of actions and events
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Graphic Organizers

Graphically representing ideas and text helps children realize the flow and direction of the text. Additionally, graphic organizers help them remember the core concepts, ideas, and the relationship between texts. They can include:

  • Tree Diagrams
  • Flowcharts
  • Tables
  • Time-Driven Pictorials and Diagrams
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Further, it will require you to guide the children and mode the practices of actually constructing graphic organizers themselves to form patterns and understanding of the comprehension.

​The K-W-L Process

The three-step KWL process is as below:

  • Know: ask the students what they know before reading the comprehension/text. They will write the answers in a “K” column.
  • Want-to-Know: inquire about any questions and what students want to learn regarding the text. They will write this in the “W” column.
  • Learned: after reading, the students can write down the answers to any questions and what they learned in a column “L.”
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Conclusion

To effectively implement strategies that can help students and children engage in comprehension writing, you should be in contact with the correct teaching material and guidance. There are many EdTech companies that provide excellent teaching material at fairly subtle rates. Using such assets to assist comprehension reading, you can improve how your child learns and reads comprehension while knowing how to extract valuable information from the text.