How to Teach Reading Comprehension Strategies

Often thought of as the most important area of reading to focus on is comprehension. If your little one reads with both accuracy and fluency, shifting your focus to comprehension makes sense. Yet, how exactly do we teach children to understand what they are reading? Which comprehension strategies and skills should we teach? Comprehension is much less noticeable since most of the comprehension strategies occur in your head. While, we can assess comprehension through questions, it is much more difficult to actually teach.

What is Comprehension?

Comprehension is being able to understand what is read. This seems so simple, but teaching comprehension is actually anything but simple. Comprehension goes beyond just understanding what is read. In addition, it pushes into analyzing, interpreting, evaluating, and even applying what is read. It is one thing to be able to answer Who, What, Where, When, and Why questions about a text. It is another to use what was read to try something new, make decisions in your own life, and help others.

Comprehension is not just something we do when we read, it actually starts before we even read the first word on a page and happens long after we read the last word of the book. The most difficult reason teaching comprehension is tricky is that we are excellent readers who use multiple strategies without thought. There are a few great strategies to help your little one to engage with a book and truly comprehend what they are reading. We love the book Strategies that Work. It is packed with so many useful tips.

Comprehension Strategies

We continue to pair these strategies with silly names and stuffed animals. My own children love reading with a stuffed animal. Therefore, we encourage them to read to the animal for the strategy they are working on. The is especially important with comprehension since most of these strategies take place in your child’s head. The stuffed animal prompts your child to slow down and really apply the strategy every so often.

As you read to your child, practice using these strategies while you read aloud too. It’s okay to make mistakes and go back to check your reading when something doesn’t make sense. Pausing to reflect may take longer to read a book, but you are giving your little one such an advantage when you show them your thinking while reading. Stop reading, and say something like, “Hmm… that didn’t really make sense. I’m not sure how _____. I’m going to go back and reread the last paragraph (or page or chapter).”

Comprehension Strategy Use

As you begin to introduce comprehension strategies, it is especially important to take it slow. We tend to get so excited and want our children to use all of these because they are just so great. Don’t rush here! Comprehension can be very overwhelming since since your child has so much to focus on. Not only are most children still working on different aspects of accuracy and fluency, but they are also trying to make sense of what they are reading. And well, authors don’t make this easy. They add in references to concepts which may be unfamiliar to children, mix up grammar rules, and use new words that children may not know well.

To a fluent reader, we use these different strategies in combination and know where to apply each one. On the other hand, children are still learning when to try a different strategy and how to actually use them. Break down each strategy into when the strategy is useful and how to use it. As children begin to build a toolbox of comprehension strategies, encourage them to try to use two strategies while reading. Pause to reflect on which was most helpful and why. This can assist your child with becoming more flexible with their comprehension strategy use.

Fix-Up Bear

As you read, pause to Check for Understanding. As you think about the story you are reading, decide if you understand what you read or if you lost comprehension. Then try to figure out when you stopped understanding. I teach my kids to pause every page when they are little, then every few pages or chapter as they grow older. The frequency needed to pause may also depend on what they are reading. When reading fiction or topics you love, you may need to pause less frequently than when reading newer or less familiar topics. And whenever we read an especially long paragraph, we pause afterwards too.

Our snuggly bear helps us out with this strategy. Fix-Up and Check for Understanding can be especially difficult because children may remember one small detail and see that was understanding. But in fact, they missed a major event in the story. Therefore, we suggest introducing this strategy orally, especially when someone else can read aloud. Then pass the responsibility to your child by asking them to read aloud and orally check for understanding before moving to more independent reading.

We also made the bear a little bigger since he’s such a tough strategy for kids to want to try. We add the motion of making a checkmark with our hand. This strategy works well with both fiction and nonfiction, but we tend to find that nonfiction has a more set structure and main idea. Due to this, we prefer to introduce this strategy with nonfiction first.

Rocky Raccoon

Encourage your little one to Make a Movie while they read. Make pictures in your head as you read, add as many details as you can. Then replay the movie when you finish reading. My little ones love to draw pictures of the characters, settings and even events of the story. A drawing makes this strategy easier to see your child’s use.

You can help your child to make a movie by asking them to describe the character, setting and events in detail. If they struggle, you can have your reader close their eyes as you describe a part of the story in detail. Be sure to ask them what they are seeing? Where they are? Who they see? How things look? Ask about color, size, location, and details.

Our sneaky stuffed raccoon works well here. The sneaky raccoon, takes in every detail they can to make their own story. We also add the motion of making two circles with our hands and holding them to our eyes, like binoculars or a 3D viewer. This strategy works better with fiction and story-like nonfiction or at least descriptive nonfiction.

Iggy the Iguana

Help your little one to Infer as they read. All readers are detectives, they use clues in the story and their own personal knowledge to try to figure out what the author does not write or directly tell them. Encourage your reader to think about why something happened or why a character acted a certain way. Inferring goes hand in hand with making predictions. This is a great strategy to introduce after your child becomes familiar with Curious Cat, especially if your child makes wild and crazy predictions. As your reader makes a prediction, encourage them to give you the clues for why they think that.

This can be a fun game with your child. We love to work with the character’s feelings in the beginning. Rarely will the author tell you how the character is feeling, instead the author will show you through actions. When a character clearly has strong feelings, pause and ask your child what the character is feeling. Most likely they will be able to tell you immediately. Then ask them how they know the character is feeling this way.

We pair this strategy with a stuffed iguana. Iguana is a favorite in our house and our kids love to dress him us as a detective with small glasses, a coat, hat, or magnifying glass. We also add the motion of looking through a magnifying glass at our clues. This strategy is much easier with fiction than nonfiction but is super important to practice with nonfiction as well.

Jabber the Reteller

Help your little one to Retell the story. We use a parrot for Jabber because he loves to talk! They should be able to give the beginning, middle and end of the story. You can also encourage them to tell about the characters, setting, problem, and solution. Many teachers are using the Somebody wanted but so then method. Here your child should name the character, what the character wanted, but why they were unable to have it (the problem), so what the character did (the solution), then describe what happens at the end.

This is a great strategy to pair with Fix-Up Bear and Turtle Talk. If your child is able to retell the story, then they usually understand what they read. If they are unable to use Jabber the Reteller, then they probably need to go back and reread. This is a great time to provide your child three pictures: bear, parrot, and turtle. You child can pause and check for understanding with bear. If they are stuck, they can retell with jabber. When they are unable to retell, they can reread with turtle.

Jabber is our colorful parrot. We like to introduce him either before or after turtle talk, depending on if our child is having difficulty with monitoring their understanding. If children try to check for understanding but focus on the last detail or another small detail, jabber is great to introduce before Turtle Talk. If your child does well understanding the gist, we like to introduce Turtle Talk first. This is because we want to teach them what to do when retelling doesn’t work. We add the motion of circling one hand to encourage a child to give more details. This strategy works well with both fiction and nonfiction, but is easier with fiction.

Strategies Work Together

We teach these nine different comprehension strategies separately, but then also work on using them together. When I read, I use many of these different strategies at the same time. So it’s also important to teach your reader to use the strategies together. In the beginning, help your reader to focus on one strategy at a time. As they grow as a reader, encourage them to have one main strategy, but also have a secondary strategy that fits what they are reading that day.

How to Help

If they struggle with picking a strategy, describe the book to them and ask which strategy might be a good one to try. “I notice that you are just beginning this book and the author is giving lots of information about the characters and setting. Which strategy could we use to help us to pay attention to all the information?”

“I notice this book is getting very exciting. There are a lot of events happening pretty quickly. What strategy could we use to help us keep the events in order as we try to figure out what will happen next?” The more ownership we can give our reader, the more independent they will become.

Final Thoughts on Comprehension Strategies

The best way to grow your reader’s comprehension is to read or listen to stories. They can read newspaper articles, magazine articles, books, poems, plays, letters, etc. The more they read, the better they will become at reading and the more they will also be able to read. I find that read to my child, no matter their age, is very helpful too. I can read books at a more challenging reading level and model reading strategies as I read, plus my little ones can use their comprehension strategies when they listen to me read as well.

Don’t miss the next post in the series detailing vocabulary strategies and how to use them. These help your child to become an independent reader and dramatically increase their vocabulary. If you found these strategies helpful, leave us a comment and let us know. We would love it if you would subscribe to our newsletter for more helpful tips and tricks as well a freebie from time to time.

Hi, I’m Nicole.

Here at Creatingbutterflies we provide families with practical solutions to real life problems for everything parenting, scouting, dual language, and enjoying time outdoors. We are a family of 6 with 4 wonderful becoming bilingual children who loves scouting, camping, and hiking with their family. Mom is an educator and dad is a firefighter/paramedic.