Comprehension Instruction: What is it and why do we teach it?

Let us help you understand what to do DURING reading to help you and your students make deep meaning from text!  Reading comprehension instruction is important to understand in order to help make your reading and teaching meaningful!  We include information about discussion, strategy instruction, metacognition, Jottings, and skills versus strategies.

Enjoy the video!

Jottings

Reading Components

Comprehension Lessons

Comprehension Resources

(Strategy Posters, Graphic Organizers, Trackers, and more!)

Two New Back-to-School Comprehension Lessons

Try these new comprehension lesson plans during your first days of school. 

Two great texts: First Day Jitters by Julie Danneburg using Question and Miss Nelson is Missing by James Marshall using Summarize.

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/First-Day-Jitters-Question-Comprehension-Lesson-Plan-4785710

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Miss-Nelson-is-Missing-Summarize-Comprehension-Lesson-Plan-4785715

You can get a head start teaching these two important strategies or review them with your class using texts that also help you set up class expectations about behavior (Miss Nelson is Missing) or help build a classroom environment of understanding that we all feel nervous sometimes (First Day Jitters).

We hope you have a great first week back to school!

NEW Graphic Organizers for Comprehension Strategy Lessons!

Download the preview today HERE to see what is all inside this 150+ page download! 

Stay tuned for videos that we will reference to these graphic organizers. 

Make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel today to not miss out! 

Comprehension Strategies

Strategies that we use to understand text are done primarily during reading. They occur in our heads as we read. Good readers are able to use strategies. Novice readers, on the other hand, often need to be taught how, when, and why we use strategies. 

The best way to ensure that a reader learns to use a strategy is first, one at a time and then, combining strategies into multiple strategy lessons.  

All of these variations of strategy lessons need to follow the Gradual Release model; I do with teacher modeling and think-aloud (page 4-5), We do, You do together, and You do alone. Click here for comprehension strategy posters!

Graphic Organizers

Graphic organizers are exactly what they say, they are graphic representation that organize our thinking and keep track of information found within the text. Use these graphic organizers with the comprehension strategies you choose for the texts you are teaching.  Use our flow chart (page 3) to help choose your strategy(ies)! 

When planning a comprehension strategy lesson, it is important that you completely read, select stopping points, and fill in a graphic organizer during your lesson creation so when you turn the kids out for the You do together and You do alone portion of the lesson you already have your thinking down on your own graphic organizer.  

Being prepared allows you to engage in conversation, discussion, and generate elaborative responses from your students as another means of assessing their comprehension of the text. After all, discussion is still one of the very best assessments of comprehension we can use. A graphic organizer can assist in that assessment. The graphic organizer is not the focus of the comprehension strategy lesson, but is the keeper of our thoughts until we can get to the time for discussion.