Blair Wright Blog #5: Chapter 8: Teach Comprehension

For my next blog post, I decided to read the chapter in Routman's book "Teach Comprehension". There were a few main points in the chapter that stood out to me. The first is that fluency is not understanding.  We can teach our students words,  how to pronounce them, sound them out, etc, but what good is all of that unless they can understand what they are reading? Simply recognizing words and reading them off a page gives us superficial readers. As teachers, it is important that students understand what they are reading. This leads me to my second point, students don't just need basic understanding of their text, but find the deeper meaning behind what they are reading. In a story, there are simple facts that need to be understood, but there are always underlying morals, themes, truths that they author has put in their story that students also need to grasp. For example, the story of the Three Little Pigs, it is a story about 3 pigs who battle with a big bad wolf, however there are morals and deeper meanings students can take away from the story as well. They need to look at the theme of the story, the big idea, or the purpose behind what is written. To  accomplish this with students, they need to be questioned and shown how to question as they read. Questioning students, teaching them to ask questions, and discussing can help them practice to find deeper meaning of text. The last point I took from this chapter is that all in all, we are wanting our students to use reading to develop problem solving skills and become critical thinkers. They need to ask why something happened, analyze characters, find the moral of the story, etc. to develop these skills, skills that will spill over into all aspects of their learning and life.