Teaching Reading Comprehension Skills

 

Nurture a Love of Reading First.

I have been working with my son to try and cultivate a love of reading in him. He does not naturally gravitate to books like my daughter does. She loves to sit in our reading corner and pick out a book.

Since we still aren’t at a stage with my son, where he can read on his own, we have been using the reading rainbow app. This app allows my son to pick books out of the “skybrary” which is filled with some awesome books.

Reading Rainbow

There are a bunch of National Geographic Kids books.  This app has been worth it for me alone since we frequently use NGKids in our unit studies. He picks 5 books at a time to read, and places them in his digital “backpack”.

Throughout the week during our D.E.A.R (Drop Everything And Read) time, he reads one (or more) of the books he has chosen. The download to the backpack so you don’t have to be connected to wifi either!

Making Comprehension Skills Fun.

After he is done reading we take out our “Reading Comprehension Cube”. We found our cube on Oriental Trading but they have them on Amazon as well. To use this cube, I made some inserts for it, I simply slide them in the pockets. I just used index cards and wrote my prompts on each card- nothing fancy!

When we are done with our story, we get out the cube and usually roll it about 4 times to ask about the book. Each side of the cube has a different prompt: Characters, Setting, Problem, Resolution, Summarize, Good Read (Did you like it or not- and why). This helps me ensure he is really grasping the story he is being read.

 

 

The cubes above are the type we use in our school room, and they work very well. I use them often and they have held up very well. We use them for a few other things but this is the primary way that we use them.