Reading strategies

Making Connections - Students make connections when reading. They make connections such as text to self experiences, text to other text they have read, text to world, and text to media experiences. Visualizing - When students have a picture in their head while reading a text, they are comprehending what they are reading. Good writers help the reader visualize in their mind using descriptive words.
Asking Questions - A good strategy is to write notes if you have a question about what you are reading, or something that you might wonder. This strategy should be modeled. Asking questions helps the reader think critically and think deeper. Predicting - Thinking about what happens next in the story helps the reader become more involved in the story.
Inferring - This task tends to be difficult for beginning readers. The writer doesn't tell the reader explicitly how a character feels and how to identify clues from the story needs to be taught as well. Synthesizing - This is when the reader combines what they already know with what they have just read. The reader is understanding the big idea in a deeper way.

Comprehension Strategies

One of best and easiest ways to develop comprehension is to teach your students is through metacognition skills. Students need to stop, think, and ask themselves What type of text am I reading? What have I understood so far? What is the author trying to tell me? Teaching text structures is a way for students to understand that if they know the type of text they are reading, they will know the key elements it contains.

Graphic organizer use in the classroom is another strategy teachers can use. Compare and contrast with Venn diagrams. Chart problem solution, brain storm ideas with the central message displayed, to name a few. 

Carl Anderson (2022) wrote a book called A Teacher's Guide to Mentor Texts Grades K-5 which is a great resource to use in the elementary classroom for developing students' understanding of text structure. The goal is to teach students to read like a writer. When we write, we write with a purpose and part of understanding a text is knowing the authors' purpose for writing.

Another strategy is to provide sentence stems for all elementary students, especially ELL students. This is another proven method to help students communicate what they understood. For example, you could write, "The main problem of the story is _____ and the problem is resolved when _________." 

What Works Clearinghouse Practice Guide by Shanahan et al. (2010) is another great resource for teachers because of the in-depth research done and the evidence is leveled from low, moderate, to highly effective in the classroom. Their recommendations are to teach how to use reading comprehension strategies, how to identify text structure, have deep conversations about what was read using high quality material (Shanahan et al., 2010). This is, hands-down the best research-based resource you can find!