- Determining Importance: Identify key details in fiction (main characters, settings, problems) and nonfiction (main topics, facts, ideas). Pay attention to text features for important information.
- Visualizing: Create mental images of the story’s setting, character appearance/actions, scenes, and topic details. Recognize that each reader visualizes differently.
- Asking Questions: Generate questions before, during, and after reading to enhance understanding. Examples include “What is this book about?” or “How were my questions answered?”
- Predicting: Guess or predict what might happen next using title, cover illustrations, prior knowledge, and text clues. Check predictions after reading and consider why the author wrote the story.
- Making Connections: Relate text to other books (Text-to-Text), personal experiences (Text-to-Self), and real-world events (Text-to-World).
- Synthesizing: Update thinking as new information is learned. Use a “At first I was thinking... Now I am thinking... After reading, I think...” framework to show evolving understanding.
- Inferring: Combine text clues with background knowledge to understand what the text implies. Ask “What do the text and pictures tell me?” and “What do I already know about the topic?” to form inferences.
Parent Tip: Review the logic above to help your child master the concept of reading comprehension strategies.
