The Reading Strategies Book Online Book Club: Chapter 5

 I am so excited to have guest, Jenny Gribble facilitating and sharing information on Goal 5!!  Please be sure to respond to Goal 5 in the comments section below the post!

Goal 5: Supporting Comprehension in Fiction

  Weak comprehension is an issue that is older than I am,,,ha!  I love, love, love how Jennifer focuses, by level, on developing comprehension.  I so wish I had the strategies she offers YEARS ago.  I am excited to use this book to help support teachers in consistently supporting comprehension strategies throughout all grades.  I really believe that we teach comprehension strategies in a way that we feel like the students have it.  We model during read alouds and we plan vocabulary focuses for guided reading. 

  What I feel we are not doing a good enough job with is teaching the students how to think for themselves so that, when support is not provided, they have the skills to do the monitoring and not just call words.  The old quote “You have to learn to read before you can read to learn” has crippled us in a way because that is how many readers develop but they struggle when it is time for them to comprehend on the level that is required on the EOG.     

    I really like how all of Jennifer’s strategies focus on teaching the reader that it is their job to recognize when something is not making sense to them and how to independently work on it!  My favorites are 5.1 Lean on the Pictures and 5.4 Uh-oh…Phew for the lower levels.  Really love 5.24 FQR for higher levels because it tells students to jot down questions when things are confusing and encourages them to use the text to make sense of things!  

  My plan is to work with teachers on think alouds in all grades to support constructing meaning from the text.  This needs to occur before, during and after reading with individuals, small groups and whole class.  The point is to slow down the reading process to allow for monitoring and a deeper understanding of the text.  

Here is a great link to Think Alouds by Reading Rockets:

http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/think_alouds