Lindsey Layton Blog Post #5: Routhman Chapter 8: Teach Comprehension

          I found Chapter 8 in Routhman’s Reading Essentials to hit home in a lot of different areas.  Students work hard and spend a lot of energy and focus on word calling and fluency that sometimes they are not able to recall and understand what they have read.  Some students can be outstanding readers but not understand and comprehend what they are reading.  This is why it is essential for educators to use different strategies that promote student comprehension and understanding.  Students should be able to make connections with a reading passage and/or book.  For instance, text to text connections and text to self-connections are excellent ways for students to make simple connections to their lives or books they have read.

            When reading as a whole group, small group, or conferencing with my students we will make inferences.  This allows students to make predictions about what they think will happen next in the story, wonder why the characters are doing what they are doing, and assess what is happening in the story.  By allowing and teaching students to make inferences, I am able to check for comprehension and understanding of the text.

            We use the SC Social Studies Weekly Newspapers as part of our 3^rd Grade informational text.  While reading the newspapers, we allow student to use highlighters to highlight important information or to review and identify specific skills.  For instance, when we were studying Common and Proper nouns, we had students highlight any Proper Nouns they could find.  This helped to check for students understanding and comprehension.   While fluency is a vital part of reading, student comprehension and understanding plays a very important role.  By educators implementing different comprehension strategies, it allows students to learn different ways that help them recall important information from a text.