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Reading comprehension for children


Comprehension | Reading Rockets

Comprehension is the understanding and interpretation of what is read. To be able to accurately understand written material, children need to be able to (1) decode what they read; (2) make connections between what they read and what they already know; and (3) think deeply about what they have read.
 

One big part of comprehension is having a sufficient vocabulary, or knowing the meanings of enough words. Readers who have strong comprehension are able to draw conclusions about what they read – what is important, what is a fact, what caused an event to happen, which characters are funny. Thus comprehension involves combining reading with thinking and reasoning.

Target the Problem: Comprehension

What the problem looks like

A kid's perspective: What this feels like to me

Children will usually express their frustration and difficulties in a general way, with statements like "I hate reading!" or "This is stupid!". But if they could, this is how kids might describe how comprehension difficulties in particular affect their reading:

  • It takes me so long to read something. It's hard to follow along with everything going on.
  • I didn't really get what that book was about.
  • Why did that character do that? I just don't get it!
  • I'm not sure what the most important parts of the book were.
  • I couldn't really create an image in my head of what was going on.

A parent's perspective: What I see at home

Here are some clues for parents that a child may have problems with comprehension:

  • She's not able to summarize a passage or a book.
  • He might be able to tell you what happened in a story, but can't explain why events went the way they did.
  • She can't explain what a character's thoughts or feelings might have been.
  • He doesn't link events in a book to similar events from another book or from real life.

A teacher's perspective: What I see in the classroom

Here are some clues for teachers that a student may have problems with comprehension:

  • He seems to focus on the "wrong" aspect of a passage; for example, he concentrates so much on the details that the main idea is lost.
  • She can tell the outcome of a story, but cannot explain why things turned out that way.
  • He does not go behind what is presented in a book to think about what might happen next or why characters took the action they did.
  • She brings up irrelevant information when trying to relate a passage to something in her own life.
  • He seems to have a weak vocabulary.
  • She cannot tell the clear, logical sequence of events in a story.
  • He does not pick out the key facts from informational text.
  • He cannot give you a "picture" of what's going on in a written passage; for example, what the characters look like or details of where the story takes place.

How to help

With the help of parents and teachers, kids can learn strategies to cope with comprehension problems that affect his or her reading. Below are some tips and specific things to do.

What kids can do to help themselves

  • Use outlines, maps, and notes when you read.
  • Make flash cards of key terms you might want to remember.
  • Read stories or passages in short sections and make sure you know what happened before you continue reading.
  • Ask yourself, "Does this make sense?" If it doesn't, reread the part that didn't make sense.
  • Read with a buddy. Stop every page or so and take turns summarizing what you've read.
  • Ask a parent or teacher to preview a book with you before you read it on your own.
  • As you read, try to form mental pictures or images that match the story.

What parents can do to help at home

  • Hold a conversation and discuss what your child has read. Ask your child probing questions about the book and connect the events to his or her own life. For example, say "I wonder why that girl did that?" or "How do you think he felt? Why?" and "So, what lesson can we learn here?".
  • Help your child make connections between what he or she reads and similar experiences he has felt, saw in a movie, or read in another book.
  • Help your child monitor his or her understanding. Teach her to continually ask herself whether she understands what she's reading.
  • Help your child go back to the text to support his or her answers.
  • Discuss the meanings of unknown words, both those he reads and those he hears.
  • Read material in short sections, making sure your child understands each step of the way.
  • Discuss what your child has learned from reading informational text such as a science or social studies book.

What teachers can do to help at school

  • As students read, ask them open-ended questions such as "Why did things happen that way?" or "What is the author trying to do here?" and "Why is this somewhat confusing?".
  • Teach students the structure of different types of reading material. For instance, narrative texts usually have a problem, a highpoint of action, and a resolution to the problem. Informational texts may describe, compare and contrast, or present a sequence of events.
  • Discuss the meaning of words as you go through the text. Target a few words for deeper teaching, really probing what those words mean and how they can be used.
  • Teach note-taking skills and summarizing strategies.
  • Use graphic organizers that help students break information down and keep tack of what they read.
  • Encourage students to use and revisit targeted vocabulary words.
  • Teach students to monitor their own understanding. Show them how, for example, to ask themselves "What's unclear here?" or "What information am I missing?" and "What else should the author be telling me?".
  • Teach children how to make predictions and how to summarize.

More information

Find out more about comprehension issues with these resources from Reading Rockets, The Access Center, and LD OnLine:

Other recommended links:

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11 Free Reading Comprehension Activities For Students

There can be a hundred teachers in a room and ninety-nine of them will have different ideas on how to help with reading comprehension. Some of them might argue that rigorous testing is the best methodology, whilst others will argue that regular pop quizzing is the best way to go. Truth be told, there is no "one" exact way to ensure that your students understand what they are reading. Instead, it's best to adopt a variety of different solutions.

Here is a list of the top 11 reading comprehension activities. You can use them to introduce new reading comprehension techniques, or simply to check your students’ understanding so far. They are all fun, innovative ways to approach reading comprehension and demonstrate your students' skills.

1.  Roll & Chat Dice

This fun activity includes lots of comprehension questions to check your kids have effective reading comprehension skills. You can adapt and change this for any student, ensuring that they are reading at grade.

Learn more: Teachers Pay Teachers

2. WANTED Poster

You can use this activity not only to ensure that your students have basic story understanding but also to demonstrate they know character traits. It can also be applied to a wide variety of texts, too. Try including some questions about characters and story detail for even more teaching of comprehension.

Learn more: Education.com

3. Story Cheeseburger

This is unfortunately not as delicious as it sounds! You can use this activity to check simple reading comprehension of story structure, as well as a more advanced understanding of story aspects. Try displaying this colorful reading comprehension activity to brighten up your classroom, too!

Learn more: Unique Teaching Resources

4. Reading Comprehension Worksheets 

This website has plenty of reading comprehension worksheets that you can print out and use for a reading passage. You can use them to teach reading strategy as part of a typical reading lesson or to have some book talk.

Learn more: K5 Learning

5. Make a Timeline

You can use this research-based teaching strategy for any non-fiction story to help demonstrate reading to knowledge skills. Ask relevant student questions about the topic of study to help expand on their knowledge and sequence events.

Learn more: Education.com

6. Yellow Brick Road Retelling

This is an excellent reading project to get your kids involved in active reading, instead of just being passive.  You can use it to talk about many elements of the story and a narrative text. You can differentiate it according to your students' reading skills, from simple story elements like the story title to more developed ideas like meaning during reading.

Learn more: Just Cara Carroll

7. Anticipation Guide

This is a perfect pre-reading activity to get your students to understand the reading process in more detail. They will need to make some predictions about the story and share their opinions on some of the ideas that the book presents. You can also return to this guide after reading to demonstrate how their reading comprehension has developed.

Learn more: Reading Rockets

8. Question Ball

You can get really creative with this activity by getting the whole class involved to answer some comprehension topic questions. You can even use it to revise key quotations or as part of a reading selection. Definitely one for student engagement!

Learn more: Coffee Cups and Crayons

9. Lego Retelling

This one is more suitable for a picture book with younger learners, but it can also be used by upper-grade students, too. Your kids will have to use the individual Lego pieces to build key scenes from a text, then explain what they have built. They can write down what they have said, too, to show that they have really understood the text well.

Learn more: The Educators Pin On It

10. Story Telling Bracelet

Another more hands-on activity, the teaching procedure of this involves assigning each color of the bracelet to a particular part of the text. For example, yellow, green, and blue all represent plot events. This is particularly useful to create a sequence of events and make story connections.

Learn more: Growing Book By Book

11. Reading Cheat Sheets

Need to help your students understand critical reading skills? Use these cheat sheets to provide them with expert details and things to keep in mind while they read a text. This includes key skills like looking at the cover, thinking about the content-area text, and other discussion questions to consider during the reading-thinking process.

Learn more: Teachers Pay Teachers

These are just a few of the best ways to make reading more accessible for your learners. The majority of these activities can be expanded upon to meet the specific needs of your readers, whether that be sequencing events or providing a detailed analysis of character.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are comprehension activities?

Comprehension activities are activities or games that can be used to help your students to demonstrate what they know about a text. This usually covers but is not limited to, setting, plot, and character. Comprehension activities can be expanded to include other ideas too, like the meaning of the text, and can go beyond the details included within the text, such as in terms of contextual information surrounding the creation of the book.

What is the best way to teach comprehension?

Unfortunately, there is no definitive "best" way to teach comprehension to your kids, as each student is different and will respond to different activities. However, one thing that will definitely work is to make comprehension an enjoyable process. Try using the activities above to help with this and avoid simply completing tests or quizzes, as these will not make your student engaged.

How can I improve my comprehension?

Try to go beyond simple ideas of comprehension. Your basic comprehension of a text should include the key events (or plot), the setting (where and when the story happens), and characters (the people or things that the text is about). You should try to expand beyond this by thinking about the meaning of the text. What message was the writer trying to put across? Reading comprehension goes beyond the words on the page - you need to think about the writer's craft, too.

What are the 3 main types of reading strategies?

The key reading strategies that you will likely encounter are scanning, skimming, and detailed reading. Scanning involves looking for specific information in a text, such as a keyword or detail. Skimming is slightly more in-depth as it is about understanding the main idea of a text by reading small chunks of the passage. Detailed reading is the slowest reading process but is the one that can help you get the most information from a text. Using this last strategy, your kids will understand approximately 80% of the text. Even so, each of these strategies is vital for teaching your students how to read effectively for information.

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. nine0004


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. nine0004

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”. nine0008 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. nine0008 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. nine0008 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. nine0008 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. nine0008 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. nine0004

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Online classes on the Razumeikin website:

  • develop attention, memory, thinking, speech - namely, this is the basis for successful schooling;

  • help to learn letters and numbers, learn to read, count, solve examples and problems, get acquainted with the basics of the world around; nine0004

  • provide quality preparation of the child for school;

  • allow primary school students to master and consolidate the most important and complex topics of the school curriculum;

  • broaden the horizons of children and in an accessible form introduce them to the basics of various sciences (biology, geography, physics, chemistry).

We teach the child to understand the meaning of the text. Free Exercises

Many children find it very difficult to make the transition from rote reading to conscious reading. One reason for this may be dyslexia, which makes it difficult for a child to focus on letters and link them into words. Therefore, reading for such children turns into torture. Read more about what this violation is and how to understand if your child has it, read here.

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Another reason why it is difficult for a child to understand what they read is the speed of reading. A child who reads slowly usually forgets what he was reading when he reaches the end of a page or paragraph. nine0004

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There can be several reasons for slow reading:

  • poor concentration of attention;
  • narrow field of vision, when it is difficult for a child to focus on a whole word, phrase or sentence;
  • speaking the text aloud or to oneself;
  • when reading, the eyes move in a chaotic manner.

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We will look at a few simple exercises for preschoolers and schoolchildren that will help increase their reading speed. nine0004

Learning to read faster

1. Attention exercises

Set a timer and ask the child to name all the letters in alphabetical order starting with the letter A and going down the table.

This exercise also focuses on concentration. Ask the child not to read the words, but in order to name the colors in which the words are written.

2. Getting rid of regression

In order for the child to read word by word, not to jump his eyes from one line to another and to be as focused as possible while reading - give the following exercise 5 minutes a day and the result will not keep you waiting. nine0004

Letters, figures, numbers and words that are in the squares must be named sequentially. Through this exercise, the child learns to move his eyes correctly and avoid regression.

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The sooner you get it, the better.

3. At the same time we train concentration of attention and logic

Ask the child to correctly form words in sentences.

Study with your child for 15-20 minutes every day and after 2-3 weeks he will read faster. And if you have already tried, but nothing worked out for you or you simply do not have enough time to study, we offer you our Reading Simulator course. nine0004

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After training, your child will learn to read faster, will understand what they read and begin to read with interest, and will be able to write simple sentences in block letters. You can sign up for a trial lesson here.

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Now let's move on to exercises aimed at conscious reading.

7 game exercises that will teach a child to understand what they read

For example, let's take an excerpt from a fairy tale and show all the exercises on it. You can also choose different passages from your child's favorite fairy tales for each exercise. nine0004

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In order not to spoil the books and not to type the text, find the electronic version of the fairy tale, select any passage and print it out.

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The text on which we will demonstrate our exercises will be taken from a children's book recommended by our student's mother Elena.

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An excerpt from the book "Shmyak the Kitten" by Robin Scotton

1. Visualizing the text

Pictures help to involve both hemispheres of the child's brain, making it easier for him to understand and remember the meaning of what he read. You can visualize the text using self-made mnemonic tables. Below is an example, and how to do them correctly, read here. nine0004

2. Making the text out of parts

Take the printed text and ask the child to read it once or twice. Then cut the text into paragraphs, shuffle it, and ask him to reconstruct the text by putting the pieces together in sequence.

3. Playing teacher

Take the printed text and invite the child to cross out the words from it in such a way that the main meaning is not lost.

4. We train logic and learn to analyze what we read

We invite you and your child to solve word logic problems. Remember the famous Soviet riddle “A, I, B were sitting on a pipe. A - fell, B - disappeared. Who stayed on the pipe? Answer - And remained on the pipe. nine0004

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This is a very simple and interesting riddle for preschoolers, which demonstrates to children the great possibilities of the Russian language.

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Below are more examples of tasks for training.

We also recommend that you develop your child's logical thinking by using our simple ideas for creating games from objects that you have at home.

5. Analyzing the text with questions

A good way to help your child build a meaningful chain is to ask questions about the text:

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  • Who is the main character?
  • What is happening to him?
  • Why do you think this is happening to him? Why was he in this situation?
  • What does this situation teach him?
  • What would you do in this situation?
  • Let's imagine what could have happened if he had acted differently?

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Such questions will help the child to grasp the meaning, highlight the main idea and easily retell what they have read.

Learn more