Helping kids reading comprehension
How to Help Your Child With Reading Comprehension
What helps kids understand what they read? Being an active reader is key. That means focusing on the text, questioning it, and taking mental notes. You can work on these skills with your child at home. Use these seven tips to help improve your child’s reading comprehension.
Are you a teacher? Check out Understood for Educators.
1. Make connections.
When kids connect what they already know to what they read, it helps them focus. Show your child how to make connections when you read aloud. If a book mentions places you’ve been to with your child, talk about those memories. Then have your child give it a try.
2. Ask questions.
Asking questions encourages kids to look for clues in the text. When you read together, ask questions to spark your child’s curiosity. Ask things like “What do you think will happen?” or “How is that character feeling?”
3. Make “mind movies.
Visualizing helps bring a story to life. That’s where mind movies come in. When you read with your child, describe what the scene looks like in your head. Talk about how it makes you feel. You can use other senses, too. For example, if the scene takes place outside, what does it smell like?
Then invite your child to make a mind movie, too. Point out how your child’s movie is different from yours. If your child likes to draw or color, encourage your child to make a picture of the scene, too.
4. Look for clues.
When you combine what you already know with clues from a story, you can make guesses or predictions. These are inferences. And making them is a great way to build reading comprehension.
For example, when we read “Kim’s eyes were red and nose was runny,” we can infer that Kim has a cold or allergies. Help your child do this as you read. If a character is wearing gym clothes and sweating, ask your child what the character might have been doing before.
5. Figure out what’s important.
Ask your child: Who are the main characters? What’s the most important thing that has happened in the story so far? What problem are the characters trying to solve? When kids can point out what’s important, they’re more likely to understand what they read.
Your child can also use a tool called a graphic organizer to do this. A “story element” organizer keeps track of the main characters, where the story is taking place, and the problem and solution of the story.
6. Check understanding.
It helps to encourage kids to stop and ask themselves, “Is this making sense?” If your child gets stuck, suggest rereading the part that didn’t make sense. What about it was confusing? Were there specific words that tripped your child up?
7. Try new things.
The more kids know about the world, the more they can get meaning out of what they read. You don’t have to take an expensive trip or go to a museum to do this, though.
You can expand kids’ background knowledge and vocabulary in lots of ways.
Shooting hoops or watching a baseball game can help your child connect more with books about sports. Riding the subway might make your child interested in books that take place in big cities.
Even with these tips, some kids still have a hard time understanding what they read. Learn more about how to help your child with reading. And get an expert’s take on why kids may have trouble understanding or remembering what they read.
My Child Struggles With Reading Comprehension. What Can I Do?
Knowing how to read and understanding what you read are two very different things. Many children are able to pronounce every word in a passage, but they lack reading comprehension skills, which means they don’t understand what the passage means.
Strong reading comprehension skills are crucial to your child’s academic and professional success. That’s why if you’ve ever thought, “My child struggles with reading comprehension,” it’s important to know what you can do to help your child improve these vital skills.
What Are the Signs Of A Reading Comprehension Problem?
It can be hard to spot the signs of a reading comprehension problem. This is especially true if your child has strong decoding and fluency skills, which means they are able to correctly pronounce words and read quickly.
Knowing how to spot the signs of a reading comprehension problem is the key to getting your child the help they need to succeed. Here are some of the signs you should look for:
- Your child is unable to determine the difference between important and minor details of a passage.
- Your child struggles to connect two different ideas within a passage.
- Your child cannot summarize what they have read or answer questions about the characters, main events, or other elements of the story.
- Your child can read a lot of words, but doesn’t understand what they mean.
If you spot any of these signs, it could indicate that your child is struggling with reading comprehension.
Why Does My Child Have Trouble With Reading Comprehension?
There are a number of reasons why a child may struggle to develop strong reading comprehension skills. Some of the most common causes of reading comprehension problems include:
- Dyslexia: This learning disability makes reading much more difficult, which can impact a child’s ability to understand what they are reading.
- Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): Kids with ADHD find it hard to pay attention, so they may not be able to focus on what they are reading, which can impact their ability to understand it.
- Lack of interest: If your child is not interested in reading, they may not be motivated to focus on the text.
- Limited vocabulary: If your child’s vocabulary is limited, they may find it difficult to extract meaning from a text since they won’t be familiar with most of the words.
- Lack of instruction: Some children struggle with reading comprehension simply because they have not been taught how to develop these skills.
As a parent, you should try to pinpoint the underlying issue that is causing your child’s reading comprehension problem. This will help you determine the best strategy that can be implemented to improve your child’s reading comprehension skills.
How Can I Improve My Child’s Reading Comprehension?
There are countless ways that parents can help improve their child’s reading comprehension skills at home. Try these strategies:
Ask Questions
Parents should get in the habit of asking their child questions about the text they are reading. Don’t wait until your child has finished reading a story to ask. You should try to ask them questions before, during, and after they finish reading. Start with these:
- What do you think this story will be about based on the cover’s illustrations?
- What do you think will happen next?
- What caused this event to happen?
- What was the character feeling when he said or did this?
- What’s the main character’s name?
Asking questions like these will keep your child engaged in the story, help them connect ideas, and deepen their understanding of the text.
Choose the Right Books
Let your child choose what they want to read. Letting your child choose will give them the opportunity to select a book that they are actually interested in reading. This may improve their ability to focus, which will enhance their reading comprehension skills.
You should also make sure that you are choosing level-appropriate books. If the text is too difficult for your child, it will be incredibly challenging for them to understand what they are reading.
Reread Difficult Passages
If your child doesn’t understand a passage, ask them to reread it with you. Then, use this as an opportunity to teach them how to extract meaning from a difficult passage.
If they encounter a word they aren’t familiar with, show them how to look it up in the dictionary. Point to context clues in the passage that they can use to figure out what the text means. Help them connect the events of the story to something that has happened in their life.
Teaching your child these strategies will help them drastically improve their reading comprehension skills.
What is the Best Reading Comprehension App For Struggling Readers?
One tool that parents can use to help their children improve their reading comprehension skills is the Readability app. Readability is the only app that is designed with a voice-based questions & answers feature, which allows your child to communicate with the app like they would with a reading tutor.
The app will ask your child questions about the text and listen as your child responds to confirm that they understood the passage. This innovative feature will keep your child engaged with what they are reading, which can help them develop stronger reading comprehension skills.
Download the Readability app on your smartphone or tablet to start the free 7-day trial today.
How to teach a child to understand what they read
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“Your child reads quickly, but does not understand and cannot retell what exactly he has read” - such phrases are not uncommon at elementary school meetings.
Parents are surprised: “The child is reading, how can he not understand what he read?”
Reading is not just a mechanical transformation of letters into words, but also a way of receiving and processing information, its further retelling.
It is important to recognize as early as possible that the child does not understand what they read, while the volume of texts and tasks is not large. This is easy to do by asking questions about the text, for example, about a read fairy tale. Without answers to questions, the child himself may not pay attention to the fact that he does not understand the meaning of what he has read.
1. Load and fatigue. Modern schoolchildren live in a world of colossal workloads, a high pace of learning. Often, a child reads a phrase and distorts its meaning, because he wants to complete the task as quickly as possible in order to move on to the next one. The child tries to meet the expectations of an adult, he experiences tremendous stress, which leads to chronic fatigue and poor academic performance
2.
Automatic reading - the child chatters the text without delving into its meaning. Unfortunately, very often adults primarily pay attention to the speed of reading, and not to its quality. While the child is learning to read, do not chase speed - it is better to read more slowly, but thoughtfully.
3. Small vocabulary. A child can read a word, but not know its meaning and lose the meaning of the entire sentence or even text. Explain to the child that he can ask adults for incomprehensible or unfamiliar words.
There are other factors that affect reading comprehension, but these are the main ones.
Games for the development of meaningful reading:
1. Puzzles of words, phrases and sentences. An adult writes a word on paper and cuts it into pieces, inviting the child to put together a “puzzle”, over time, the task becomes more complicated to sentences.
2. The word is lost: the adult reads the text and skips the words, the task of the child is to guess which words were “lost”.
3. Vocabulary expansion games: we invite the child to list as many words as possible for a hidden letter. This game is great because you can play it on the way to kindergarten or school or anywhere, because. it does not require any materials and preparation.
4. Children's Scrabble: word building game for children, expands the child's vocabulary
5. Scrabble: from simple words to complex ones. Playing with an adult, the child not only expands vocabulary, but also improves spelling.
6. Theater based on a fairy tale read: an adult will need props, you can use ordinary toys or buy a ready-made puppet set for a certain fairy tale. The task of the child is to read the fairy tale and try to reproduce it together with the adult with the help of dolls.
What to do if the child does not understand what they read?
To begin with, the parent must clearly understand that the child is having a hard time, he does not create problems on purpose, he needs help, and adult dissatisfaction will only worsen the situation.
1. Make sure your child knows all the letters of the alphabet with confidence. Not according to the alphabet or cubes, but according to the text, where there are no pictures that can tell.
2. Do not push the child, no matter how slowly he reads. On the contrary, you can stop the child and ask him clarifying questions, especially about words and phrases that caused difficulty reading.
3. After reading the text, be sure to discuss what you read, ask questions to make sure that the child understands what he read.
4. When memorizing verses, also check whether the child understands their meaning. Explain unfamiliar words if necessary.
5. Let the child read as they like: underlining the line of text with a ruler, sheet or finger. The problem that parents do not attach importance to: the line. A child can simply get lost and confused in the abundance of text, so it is important to underline the readable line.
6. Offer your child books with large text, short phrases, and an interesting plot.
7. A child who does not understand what they read is vulnerable at school in the classroom. Review the task for the next day, sort out what will be incomprehensible - so the child will feel more confident.
8. Be sure to support the child, pay attention to even the smallest of his successes.
In any business, the main thing is practice. Perhaps success will not come immediately, but over time, with regular classes, the child will begin to understand the meaning of what he read.
On the Razumeikin website you will find lessons of different difficulty levels for developing reading skills and reading comprehension. The Learning to Read course will help your child learn to read and understand what they read. Assignments from the section "Reading" in the courses Learning for every age will help in a playful way to learn to understand the meaning of what is read.
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Online classes on the Razumeikin website:
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develop attention, memory, thinking, speech - namely, this is the basis for successful schooling;
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help to learn letters and numbers, learn to read, count, solve examples and problems, get acquainted with the basics of the world around;
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provide quality preparation of the child for school;
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allow primary school students to master and consolidate the most important and complex topics of the school curriculum;
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broaden the horizons of children and in an accessible form introduce them to the basics of various sciences (biology, geography, physics, chemistry).
How to teach a child to understand and remember the read text?
You spend a lot of time helping your child learn to read. You try to be patient and not rush him. He reads and rereads the same paragraph, but he never “understands” it. Why is it so difficult for a child to understand what he reads?
It's great that you support your child's reading endeavors. Your disappointment is understandable, you have spent a lot of time and effort on teaching your child, but at the same time you do not see much improvement. Rest assured, you have already done a lot just by showing your child how much you care about him.
The ability to make sense of sentences and paragraphs involves a complex combination of many skills and abilities. In order to provide a child with the right support in reading, it is necessary to understand the nature of his difficulties.
The process of decoding and word recognition
The process of decoding is the transformation of a graphic model of a word into an oral language form.
The ability to match the written and sound designation of a word is an important step in learning to read. Decoding is the foundation on which all learning to read is built.
If your child gets lost in the decoding process, they will have difficulty reading comprehension. To develop your decoding skills at home, take classes in the new Fast ForWord Foundations correctional online program. Decoding is a very important process - the more words a child can automatically recognize at a glance (without having to pronounce each letter or syllable), the faster he will be able to read.
Reading fluency
Why does fluent reading matter? If a child reads each word syllable by syllable, it takes him a long time to read the whole sentence. This makes it difficult to memorize all the words in a sentence and understand how they fit together.
One way to learn to quickly recognize a word is to read it out loud several times. This is why reading the same passage repeatedly can help a child learn to read fluently.
Reading comprehension level
Even if your child is a good reader, he may be reading books that are well above his current level of comprehension. The most important thing is that the child can not only read the text, but also comprehend it. Sometimes teachers evaluate reading skills - how well a student can read and understand a text. These grades also reflect important information - whether the student needs help.
Talk to the teacher about your child's reading skills. You can ask the teacher to recommend books for home reading that are appropriate for your child's reading level. You can also choose books by yourself. For example, when choosing a book, ask your child to read a few pages and talk about what they just read. The book is suitable if the child really understands what they read.
Attention Concentration
Difficulty concentrating is another reason your child may have reading comprehension problems. Reading comprehension also depends on the ability to ignore distractions.
If your child has difficulty concentrating, it may be due to an executive function disorder, an auditory processing disorder, or ADD/ADHD. These impairments can affect his ability to understand and retain information in working memory.
You can help your child to reduce the load, for example, teach him to break reading tasks into small parts, take notes, highlight important information.
Comprehension skills and strategies
Reading is thinking.
And the way we think is the basis for improving comprehension while reading. To improve text comprehension, sometimes we need to consciously stop while reading and analyze our ideas and thoughts related to what we have read.
You can teach your child to be an active reader. Encourage him to voice all his thoughts and doubts, ask questions as he reads, read aloud one paragraph at a time and discuss what he read.
Point out to him that experienced readers also monitor how well they understand what they are reading and reread confusing parts of the text. Learn to look for contextual clues around a sentence or phrase, such as pictures or words in adjacent sentences, can help your child understand the meaning of words they don't understand. Help your child learn these strategies by example.
Additional support
Be sure to talk to your child's teacher about additional support at school.
Remember that your continued attention and encouragement will have a long-term positive impact on your child's education.
