Comprehension skills:How to help your child understand and enjoy their reading.

Reading

If we think of comprehension in its widest sense, it means an understanding of the text and developing appreciation and love of reading.

Make sure your child has books they love and plenty of them - from school and the library. Many good online texts are now available, comics and magazines are important too. Chat to your child about their choices and preferences. Encourage them to read widely.

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At school we teach comprehension skills in whole class, group or guided reading sessions and also when we listen to individual children read. Reading comprehension is taught in all classes, although the emphasis on different skills changes as the children become older.

Children learn about the features of different genres.

They learn to talk about their understanding in general terms - for example, their preferences and opinions. They learn to retell and summarise events and predict outcomes, develop a wider vocabulary and form a more detailed understanding of how language is used in a range of fiction and non fiction books. In non fiction books, children learn to locate specific information, use indexes and contents pages , retrieve and make sense of facts.

Children also learn to read ‘closely’. Close reading at school can focus on the word, sentence or the book as a whole and could be called an early form of textual analysis.

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To help the children, we break the comprehension skills into -

Right There : The literal - the details in the text you can put your finger on.

Think and Search :The questions or ideas which involve a search for evidence in the text.

On My Own: The forming of an opinion which is supported by the text or a wider understanding of the book or genre.

The ‘think and search’ and ‘on my own’ questions and approaches involve the more complex skills of inference and deduction.

How to Help your Child with Comprehension at HomeIntroduce the book and chat about your child’s book choices.Discuss new words and ideas and make links with other books and real world events.Ask questions – What, Where, When and (harder) Why, How, Do you think…? Can you find evidence for…?Talk about specific words, sentences and paragraphs.Use our hints and tips on reading on our website.Keep it fun! Remember that the objective is to understand and enjoy reading. Too many questions can disrupt the flow and enjoyment of reading.

Lastly, let us know if it’s not fun and we’ll help.

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