Module 5- Comprehension

Important Concepts:

1.       As a teacher, you need to CAREFULLY choose the text you read to your class.  Many times we get caught up in the fact that we just need to be reading, that we don’t focus on the strategy we are trying to teach and whether or not the text is a good choice for that strategy.  For example, if we are going to teach a prediction strategy, you would want to choose a text that the students have not read before.  Along with the text being new, you would want the text to have a sequence of events and for it to be able to provide sufficient clues to allow the reader to make informal predictions.

2.        A comprehension routine that was new to me was the Reciprocal Teaching.  I thought students would really enjoy being able to “become” the teacher.  With Reciprocal Teaching, the students get to ask the questions about the text, summarize, ask questions for clarification, and predict what will happen in the next paragraph of the text.

3.       I never really thought about how much word recognition would influence comprehension.  Usually when you think of word recognition, it’s to become more fluent in your reading.  But Word recognition does affect comprehension.  If a student has to sound out words while reading, that takes up most of their capacity in their mind, causing them not to have enough room left for comprehension.  Therefore, when students learn to recognize words fluently, their comprehension improves.

Implementation

I plan to start carefully choosing the books I read.  Sometimes, I get so hung up on using our curriculum and although there are some good resources that come out of our curriculum, it is okay to supplement with other materials.  It is easy to make predictions about any book by looking at the cover, but if I’m truly going to want to focus on a prediction strategy, I would need to use a book that would allow my students to make predictions throughout the entire book. 

Strategy

I used Possible Sentences with my kindergarten students.  We did it a little different that the article, but I presented a book and 5 vocabulary words from that book.  We discussed the meaning of the vocabulary words and then we did a picture walk before reading the book.  After the picture walk, I had the students create sentences that they thought might be in the book, but they had to use one of the vocabulary words in each sentence.  They had to keep in mind the picture that they saw, the meaning of the word.  I kind of helped them decide which vocabulary word might be used on a particular page, but once they had their sentences finished, we read the book the next day.  They loved seeing their sentence on the board compared to the sentence in the book.  And it also helped them to see that there isn’t only one sentence for a word.  We changed the sentence in the book and inserted their sentence to see if we could use their sentence instead.  They really enjoyed this.  I plan to use this in the future.  It helps them to understand the vocabulary words a lot better which in turn helps them to comprehend the story better.