Chapter 8: Teach Comprehension
Reading
comprehension was something that I always struggled with as a reader in
school. First I was a slow reader and
had to reread passages a lot, making reading not enjoyable. I am not sure if I was
never taught the right strategies or just slow to process what I read. So I really loved this chapter on teaching
children to comprehend what they read.
In the
beginning of the chapter, Routman discussed that there is great emphasis on
word calling, automatically, and fluency in the early grades. I would completely agree with this. We are constantly assessing our students on
their fluency. However, how appropriate
is it that a student can word call from the SRA manual or meet the fluency
requirements in the SRA manual? How well
is this really assessing their comprehension?
Students
should be taught strategies to understand what they read. We are always teaching strategies to decode
words. Making connections, determining
the importance, visualizing, asking questions, and making inferences are all
very important skills that must be taught in order to gain comprehension
skills. I use many of these skills when
teaching my students how to comprehend what they are reading.
Agreed! So important . . . from day one . . . to not only stress phonemic awareness and fluency, but to make sure that comprehension is also taking place. Keep it up! Those are the things that are going to take students to the next level.
ReplyDeleteYou're making me think back to my own experiences as a reader in school. I honestly don't remember being taught to comprehend--other than the questions I had to answer at the end of the basal story. But that wasn't teaching me how to comprehend, that was just doing it, haha!! That's similar to SRA--yes, where is the comprehension in the speed with which our students word call? You ask some great questions in this post!!
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