Jill McDougald Nov. Blog Post #4 Teach Comprehension, Ch. 8 Routman

Comprehension is very hard for first graders to grasp!  Most first graders are developing readers trying to figure out how to read words much less remember and understand what they have read.  Routman suggests, "We should teach comprehension right from the start."  Students need to understand  what they are reading to get the meaning of the story.

Our first grade team has added some key questions this year to our shared reading discussion to help our readers understand our stories better.  Here are those questions:  "What is the genre of the story?",  "Who is telling the story?" and "What is the author's purpose?"  We discuss the genre of the story before our first reading of the story.  We discuss who's telling the story and what's the author's purpose after the first reading of the story.  We use the rereading strategy a lot in first grade.  By the end of the week, our students have had the opportunity to reread the shared reading story at least 5 times.

In reading the section called, "Teach Students to Survey Text Before They Begin to Read" my mind started churning.  Later this year, we will be writing nonfiction animal books.  I will demonstrate this strategy to my students to show them how to "hone in on exactly the information they're interested in."

This chapter has a lot of useful information on teaching comprehension.  I realize the most important thing I need to do is make my thinking process visible to my students when teaching comprehension.