The ultimate goal for literacy is to comprehend well what one is reading. As one of the Five Pillars of Reading, reading comprehension enables a child to predict outcomes, evaluate characters, deduce, and make connections to real-world events.
A child’s comprehension skills can begin to develop before becoming an independent reader. One way to do this is by reading to a child and discussing the story’s main idea, characters, and setting. Explicit teaching, modeling, and guided practice of comprehension skills are also crucial. This is especially true for students whose reading comprehension skills lag behind their peers.
A child has mastery of reading comprehension when he or she can:
- Process and understand events, dialogue, ideas, and information
- Relate new information to previous knowledge or what they already know
- Adjust current knowledge in relation to new ideas or information and look at ideas in different ways or standpoints
- Identify and recall key points in a story or other reading material
- Understand hidden or underlying meanings (read between the lines)
Best to tackle these 4 sentences types for reading comprehension:
- Passive voice
- Adverbial clauses and temporal and causal conjunctions
- Center-embedded relative clauses
- Sentences with three or more clauses
Read about 2021 Reading Model for Fluency, Comprehension, Self-Regulation, and Vocabulary.