Reading Comprehension

HAVING THE EDGE
FOR
GETTING AHEAD
Life beyond chicken nuggets and Wii!

While the eleven weeks of summer vacation is a break from school, it doesn’t have to mean a break from learning. In terms of reading, once students learn decoding, they can decode anything but they can’t understand what they read if they have a narrow view of the world. Let’s face the fact that the entire purpose of reading is comprehension. So this summer, let your focus be helping your child gain “knowledge”—specifically “knowledge” which ultimately can be applied to reading comprehension.

Beyond, sounding out words and properly identifying new vocabulary, being able to bridge gaps in reading by making connections to the subject matter is crucial to comprehension. When authors write they leave out information and expect the reader to fill in the blanks with acquired background knowledge. To test this element of background knowledge being tied to reading comprehension, a study was done with preadolescent children. One group was made up of poor readers who knew about baseball and the other group was made up of good readers not having much background knowledge about baseball. The study revealed that the group of poor readers having background knowledge about baseball did far better than the good readers did when answering comprehension questions about the reading passage.

That brings us to the question “How is a student supposed to acquire all of this background knowledge?” One way to acquire knowledge is to turn off the TV and the computer and explore the world. Parents might be surprised to know that on average only 5% of the classroom time for a third grader is spent on topics of Science and 5% of classroom time is spent on topics of History. That means much of the learning your child needs to acquire about life, needs to come from home. You are your child’s best teacher.

This summer, make it a weekly ritual to visit your local library and select books on a variety of topics. Read books to your children as well as have your children read to you. Select books which expose your children to Science, History, Geography, Music, Art, Civics, Theatre and the like. Plan a field trip once a week to give your child a more hands on experience with learning. The experience doesn’t have to cost much to be educational. For example, take a walk in the woods and see how many different types of leaves you can identify. Go to a zoo and make your own scrapbook with photos your child has taken and factual data he has collected. Explore a different culture by locating the country on a map, learning some of its history and points of interest for tourists, then finish by making an ethnic meal. Who knows, maybe your children may actually like eating Spanakopita, wearing a toga while discussing what days were like for children in ancient Greece!

There is a whole world to explore out there beyond chicken nuggets and Wii. Your children may experience initial symptoms of withdrawal from life as they know it, but isn’t it worth creating a life to be experienced and remembered? Here’s to the summer of ’09! Read well and prosper!

Engaging The Senses

With only two months left in the school year, parents all over the country are brainstorming ways to help their children keep up their academic skills during the summer. When evaluating potential programs or curriculum for at-home use, look for a multi-sensory approach. By fully engaging the senses, we can fully engage the child.

Research by William Glasser M.D. tells us we remember/learn:
10% of what we read
20% of what we hear
30% of what we see
50% of what we see and hear
75% of what we discuss with someone else
85% of what we personally experience
95% of what we teach to someone else

As a Learning Coach I try to help many struggling readers with fluency and comprehension. Most of my clients are visual-spatial or kinesthetic learners so I ask them to engage their senses while they read. When they read for meaning I have them stop after every sentence and tell me what they see or feel. They lay down meaning from what they read frame by frame as in a movie.

Consider this sample reading passage: “Then the drought came and stayed. The land begged for water, but even Pecos Bill couldn’t make it rain.”

To check comprehension I begin by asking the child, “What does the word drought mean?” Many times a student can decode a word but not understand what it means. I suggest that we can get a clue from other words in context. I ask the student, “What did the author mean when he wrote that the land begged for water?” To use all of his senses I might ask the child to demonstrate or act out the scene in order to try to make the sentence more concrete. I might say, “Pretend you are the ground and beg for water.” Then I have the child think about why the ground would beg for water. My hope is that the child would draw the conclusion that the ground would beg for water if it was dry or “thirsty for rain.”

It would be safe to guess that the word “drought” used in the first sentence meant “a long period of dry weather, with little or no rain. To check our prediction, we look the word up in the dictionary to see if we are correct. This gives the child another skill to use if he can not get clues in context. By using the dictionary, the child can integrate the spelling of the word, the pronunciation of the word as well as the definition.