Comprehension in the Classroom

The article "What every teacher needs to know about comprehension" gave me a lot of a great tips for aiding comprehension in my students. Some tips include teaching decoding skills, help build fluency,  help activate prior knowledge, build vocabulary, motivate students, and encourage students to personally respond to the text. I felt that these tips were extremely helpful and made me realize how many factors contribute to a child's comprehension. Pardo also explained how important a student's use of schema, or grouping of ideas, is to their comprehension. The use of schema helps students gain fluency and read through texts quickly so they are able to focus more on the ideas and thoughts behind the words rather than the words themselves. 

What are some tools or activities that can promote reading comprehension?

Do you ever feel as though you are not comprehending the text you're reading? If so, how do you ensure that you are understanding it?

Improving Fluency in Children

"Creating Fluent Readers" by Timothy Rasinski conveyed how important fluency is to developing readers. Rasinski expresses that there are three dimensions of reading fluency; accuracy in word decoding, automatic processing, and prosodic reading. The purpose of successfully making it to the third dimension is so students can easily read the surface text so they can focus on finding the meaning behind the words. One way that fluency can be improved is to model fluent reading. Another way is to incorporate texts that are meant for performance such as poetry, speeches, and riddles. The article also introduced the idea of transforming a corner of the classroom into a performing area. Here is where students can perform their assigned readings which improves their fluency and allows them be creative at the same time.

What are some of your favorite children's poetry books?

What is a fun way to incorporate fluent reading into your classroom?

Making Words

Making Words is a fast-paced game that incorporates guided invented spelling. Studies have shown that invented spelling plays a crucial role in students' reading, writing, and spelling acquisition. However, it's more important that a student's invented spelling is guided because without instruction it doesn't promote phonemic awareness. I think that this activity is an excellent way to get kids excited about spelling and could see myself using this in my future classroom. While the article was very thorough and detailed, I had a difficult time putting each step together and imagining how the lesson would play out. I found a short video that helped bring the article to life.

Source

Will you practice the Making Words activity in your future classroom?

Is there anything about Making Words that you would alter?