Cultivating Confident Readers

A common hurdle for parents and teachers alike is convincing kids to read. While there is the eternal challenge of finding an amazing book to get lost in (not to mention learning to get lost in a book!), video games and social media present intense competition for kids’ limited attention. Plus, it isn’t enough to just pick up a book and read the words in it! Today’s classrooms demand that students engage with text in more ways than ever, and that starts with strong comprehension. 

There are a number of tools and strategies that can help improve a child’s ability to comprehend text, but first, it’s important to make sure they actually enjoy reading. For a child who despises reading, whether that’s because it’s “too hard” or “boring”, there is hope! It just takes a little legwork. Help them find a book that sparks joy. It might take some digging, but there IS a book out there that will get him or her to fall in love with reading (or at least with that particular book...but we have to start somewhere.) Help your child discover what that genre is that they just won’t be able to put down, and find as much of it as you can. It might be graphic novels, cookbooks, magazines, instructional manuals...if it has text, let them read as much as they want! Then help them develop their comprehension skills with the tools and strategies below.

Supporting Young Readers

In the early grades (Kindergarten through around Fourth Grade), students need a balance of instruction in phonics, fluency, and comprehension. While these skills can be isolated in lessons or through homework activities, it is crucial for students to engage in multi-faceted reading instruction during these formative years. This starts at school, but there are many ways to supplement instruction through fun activities at home. 

• To help students who find decoding to be an obstacle, Scholastic has some creative ideas for making your own phonics games to reinforce this skill, and Homer is an amazing app to support early phonics learning. 

• To practice fluency, many kids love Reader’s Theater scripts, which are an excellent way to help your child bring characters to life by practicing vocal expression and changing intonation, an important part of fluency development. 

• If your child struggles with self-monitoring while reading--making many errors and not catching them--, see if they would be open to recording themselves while they read, so that they can hear how they sound as a reader. Most students love hearing their voices on tape (but some don’t)!

If your child struggles with understanding what he or she reads, here are 7 essential skills for building comprehension:

1. Previewing text - Skim pictures, look for keywords, think about what the book will be about based on the title/blurb on the back.

2. Asking questions - Ask who, what, when, where, and especially why and how questions before, during, and after reading

3. Making predictions - Use clues from the text to guess what will happen next

4. Making inferences - Use clues from the text to draw a logical conclusion about what is happening that is not stated in the text

5. Making connections - Relate the text to yourself (text-to-self connection), another book (text-to-text connection), or the world (text-to-world connection)

6. Summarizing the text - Put the important events and details into your own words

7. Evaluating the text - Look closely at how the author wrote the book, think about what you learned from this book, and what you will do with what you learned 

To make the most of their time reading, kids should be active readers. This means being engaged in the text, having a pencil in hand, asking and answering questions, re-reading for deeper meaning, and above all, reading books they love! To learn more about supporting early readers, check out our post on talking to kids about books and reading to learn.

Building Reading Skills in Secondary Grades

By Middle School, most students have mastered the skill of decoding, and can now focus all of their reading energy on building fluency and getting better at deciphering what the text means instead of what it says. For the former, the most important thing for kids to do is read, and read a lot! From books and comics to recipes and social media posts, the more kids practice their reading, the more fluency and vocabulary they’ll build. As for building their comprehension skills, active engagement with the text is key and purposeful annotations are the best tool for their reading toolbox! 

Students in upper grades should always have a pencil in hand for underlining, highlighting, and note-taking while they read. Here are our suggestions for how to use these tools most effectively.

• If a child struggles with figuring out what to highlight, it can help to use different colors to highlight for different foci such as important figures, themes, dates, and events.

• Students can write down questions, predictions, or connections to prior knowledge in the margins or in a graphic organizer. 

• They can write down connections between what they are reading and what they already knew about the topic. 

• Students can also look for things like text structure, which can help them determine what information is most important and what is more peripheral. 

• In order to navigate the new vocabulary they may come across, especially in content-specific texts, students should practice using context clues to try to determine the meaning of unknown words, then check their definition using a dictionary. 

• It can also help students to vocalize while they are reading; hearing their own voice speak the information out loud can help their brains more fully process that information. 

Ultimately, mastery of a text boils down to engagement; the more actively a reader engages with a text, the more he or she will get out of that reading. While so many kids see annotation as an annoying or distracting extra step in an already complicated process, it is important to explain that this extra step will become easier and more natural with practice, and will lead to immeasurable gains in learning. Not only will they gain a better understanding of what they read, they will also be able to more effectively and efficiently navigate that text to find the information they need to write their essay or build their study guide. Learn more about annotation strategies through our post on next level annotations!

Reading for all Ages

LETTER FROM MARA

Reading is such a fundamental part of our everyday existence, we often take for granted what a complicated task it can be. We read emails and work communications to do our jobs; we read the news and articles of interest to stay abreast of what is happening in the world; we read directions and agreements to make decisions; many of us read academic texts for work; and when we have time, we read for pleasure. Each of these tasks requires us to read differently, but because of practice and experience, our brains understand how to adapt the way we read to get the most out of the task at hand - for example, looking for important details and taking notes when reading for work, versus skimming the news or getting lost in the story of a book without worrying about remembering every detail. These are subconscious choices we make as experienced readers that come to us as second nature, which is why it can be so hard to understand why kids have difficulty with reading comprehension.

For children, mid-to-late elementary school marks the transition from learning to read to reading to learn. At this stage, we expect students to be fluent decoders capable of investing their mental energy into making meaning of what they read. We want kids to learn to make connections to the text based on their knowledge of the world, their personal experiences, and other books or articles they’ve read. While this is the expectation, though, it is important that we help students along as they learn to think more deeply as readers. With that in mind, Talking to Kids About Books includes a great list of questions you can use to guide more meaningful conversations with your child about what they are reading, and Reading to Learn offers a list of helpful strategies to support comprehension.

For more advanced students, 7th and 8th grade is when kids must learn how to analyze a text. Knowledge of reading must go hand-in-hand with ideas about how an author used subject, form, and diction in order to create a more compelling story. Learning to read closely in this way can require a lot of guidance and practice, and that is why it is so important that students understand how to go about this process strategically. A 7th grader isn’t likely to pick up on themes of isolation or male companionship when reading Of Mice and Men, just as so many high schoolers (and, at times, adults!) struggle with Shakespeare.However, understanding how to utilize online resources to preview themes, or watching a performance of Romeo and Juliet before unpacking the text, can make a world of difference by assisting students to read and annotate with purpose. Next Level Annotation provides useful ideas for helping kids develop these more advanced reading skills.

Next Level Annotations

As students grow older, the demands of their classwork evolve; rather than merely summarizing plot or retaining historical dates, students are challenged to think critically, as they take their base of skills and knowledge and use these tools to forge original analysis. In parallel with this evolution in their education must come an evolution in the way they read, and in the way they annotate. With luck, students will have been building up simple annotation habits for some time by this point — but now, the purpose of annotation shifts, from a tactic for staying engaged with the reading, to an active commentary that records insight and evidence with a grander end goal in mind: the analytical essay.

When students read with the aim of collecting evidence to use in an essay, they do so under a variety of different circumstances. Some teachers might provide a framework or prompt before reading begins — others will wait until after the class has finished reading a text before distributing the essay assignment. In either case the goal of annotation is the same: to activate the mind as students read, and start them down the path of critical analysis. The key here is reading with a clear purpose. If the prompts are distributed ahead of time, students should come up with a key — by numbering them for example — and mark the text with the appropriate number whenever they find a quote that could be of use in responding to that prompt. For visually-oriented learners, pens or post-it notes in different colors for different themes can enhance the process. Even if they don’t have the list of possible prompts before they begin reading, students should use a site like LitCharts to preview the text, searching for important themes that they can annotate in a similar way, as these are likely to be helpful for the eventual essay. It’s best to focus on two or three themes at a time — and remember that one piece of evidence might be helpful for more than one theme, and should be marked with more than one number or color. 

If they’re writing a research paper, and using sources that they find independently, many students will find that the challenge is sifting through the text to find relevant evidence. Here, too, there is a shift in the approach to reading; rather than starting from the beginning and reading a stack of library books through the end, students should begin with a focused question and use strategic searches to isolate the evidence they need. This means using the table of contents, learning to navigate an index, focusing on headings, and searching intelligently through online databases. As students encounter the information they will need, they should be compiling quotes into a central location, making sure to include source information and page numbers as they read and record to smooth the process of creating a bibliography later on. Online tools such as easybib.com, citationmachine.net, and the reference materials at Purdue’s Online Writing Lab make creating citations easier than ever, but most students will need an introduction to the process — both in order to understand the required formatting and its intention, and to avoid unintentional plagiarism. 

The right kind of annotation will make the process of writing a critical essay or research paper ten times simpler, and much more effective at the same time. Not only can annotation provide the kind of record that students can easily transfer into a brainstorm and outline, it will activate their way of thinking about the text as they read, setting them up for success as writers.