Boosting Comprehension: Four easy strategies for increasing understanding while reading

jessicabunnell2
Nov 3
5 min read

How can we support understanding of the story while we read? Let's jump into 4 easy strategies that we can implement next time we are reading with our kiddos!

Welcome back to our series all about language and literacy. In the past few blog posts, we have chatted all about dialogic reading, a strategy aimed to support comprehension, early literacy skills, as well as speech sound practice while reading. You can follow along with us on Instagram here - we summarize the information into easy-to-implement tidbits! Today we are diving into 4 easy-to-implement strategies that you can use next time you're reading with your child to help support their ability to understand what they read.

Before we dive into the strategies, let's review what reading comprehension is. Reading comprehension captures all of the skills that are necessary in order for your child to understand what they are reading. There are multiple evidence-based strategies that help us support our kiddos with understanding, helping them to process the story and its meaning, and integrate the new information with what they already know. In today’s post, you will read about four strategies that you can implement easily during your routines whenever shared reading is taking place! Of note, this post is not all-inclusive and will not cover every reading strategy….if you are interested in learning more about comprehension strategies or if you aren’t sure about whether your child might need more support to understand stories, don’t hesitate to reach out! We have a literacy specialist and several trained SLPs on our team that can guide you in the right direction!

1) Activating Background Knowledge

This is a super easy strategy that can be used before and during reading! This strategy is all about helping our kids to think about what they already know that is related to the story in some way. We can use this strategy in so many ways, from graphic organizers to a simple conversation about the story. You might point out some key vocabulary words that are in the story, identify an event, place, or theme that your child is familiar with, or even look through the photos to identify things that might be familiar to your child. We might also ask targeted questions about what the student knows about the story or the topic to help them start thinking about what they already know that is related to the story. This simple yet effective strategy helps kids use information and vocabulary that they already know to strengthen their understanding of the story. We are helping them explicitly bridge new information to familiar information and create that connection in their brain!

2) Predicting

You can practice predicting what happens next in the story before you read and even during your reading time. Try talking about the name of the story, talking about background knowledge related to the story topic (hint: think about the conversation you had with your child during strategy #1) or even taking a ‘picture walk’ and looking through some of the pictures in the story to help make predictions about what might happen next. We like to ‘chunk’ stories by stopping periodically while reading to talk about what might happen next before we turn the page! This is a great opportunity to check-in with what your child understands about the story and get them re-engaged and critically thinking about what events are happening and what they might already know that can help them make a prediction!

Some examples of questions you can ask to support this critical thinking are:

What do you think might happen next?
I see XYZ in the picture! What do you think might happen?
Wow, XYZ just happened! Before we keep reading, what do you think might happen to XYZ?
Hmm, sometimes after I do XYZ, this happens…what do you think might happen to character after they do XYZ?
Why do you think that might happen next? (this one is a little bit more advanced and can really help with critical thinking skills)

These questions are all aimed at helping our children gain a deeper understanding of the story by thinking critically about what's happening and about what they already know about the events or topics to predict what may happen next. They help the child to tune into the story and connect their understanding and their background knowledge to further engage with the material.

3) Making Connections

The third reading strategy is making connections. Similar to predicting and activating background knowledge, making connections is another way to help kids think critically about the story and use their own experiences to deepen their understanding of story elements, character motivations, and even the emotions that might be embedded in the story! There are 3 main types of connections that we want to be thinking about while we're asking ‘connection’ questions.

Text to text connections are those that help kids to identify similarities between different stories that they have read.
Text to self connections are those that help kids to recognize similarities or connections between their own experiences and those that are happening in the story
Text to world connections help kiddos to find connections between the story and real-world events or elements.

4) Summarizing

Summarizing is a great way to help kids recap what they have read in the story and it gives us as the reading partner a sneak peak into their understanding and ability to retell the story. We can adjust this task based on the child that we are reading with and their age/reading level. For very young kids, we might want to approach summarizing by looking back in the story and talking about what happened in the pictures or by asking more concrete questions (asking questions that can be pointed to in the pictures). For our older kids, we can help them understand story elements (characters, setting, rising action, falling action, emotions, problem, solution, etc.) to understand how to provide a summary of the most important parts of the story. Things like visuals and graphic organizers can be so helpful in structuring these types of discussions! There are multiple resources that you can use and lots of places to grab some free and easy graphic organizers that you can print or use digitally to help support your littles through this process! If you find that your child is needing more support with this, a combination of guiding questions, visuals, and the organizers can help to support this!

Final Thoughts

These simple comprehension strategies are now tools in your toolkit that you can use anytime you are reading with your child to boost their comprehension and help them tune into the story. A bonus advantage of these strategies is that many of them provide natural opportunities to chunk the information in the story (reading small bits and digesting the information before moving on) and process the information in a new way before continuing on in the story! This helps to set the stage for self-monitoring that we all use when reading later in life.

If you are finding that your child is struggling with story comprehension or reading in general, a skilled literacy professional or speech-language pathologist can help identify what area of reading (whether language comprehension, reading skills, phonological skills or a combination of skills) may be supported to help your child grow! We always advocate for the earliest intervention to support kiddos as they grow. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us with any questions or concerns and we can guide you in the right direction. We have experienced SLPs with speech sound specialties and our very own literacy specialist available to answer your questions and provide support! Check out contact information on our website or learn more about our team.

A Bonus Freebie for Our Readers...

We love comprehension strategies so much that we created a freebie just for our readers! Click below to download a bookmark that you can pair with any book to support reading comprehension with these simple strategies!