Reading Comprehension Resources

This video provides a brief explanation of the Reading Rope, which includes the specific skills necessary for reading comprehension and word recognition.

Reading Comprehension skills:

• background knowledge

• vocabulary

• language structures

• verbal reasoning

• literacy knowledge

Word Recognition skills:

• phonological awareness

• decoding

• sight recognition

Reading comprehension strategies:

Think Aloud: Explain each step of your thinking and the thought process that goes with each step.

Video explaining the think aloud strategy

Graphic Organizers: Have your child retell or paraphrase what they've read by using a graphic organizer.

Example of story map graphic organizer

Question Answering: Ask your child questions as they read to monitor if they understand the story. Provide both open-ended and literal questions.

Close Reading: Help your child make connections with what they already know, either through personal experiences or other things they've learned about. When your child answers your questions, ask "Where did you find that information?" to have them cite the evidence and connect to the text.

Question Generation: Have your child come up with good questions to ask themselves before, during, and after reading to monitor comprehension. These can be both closed- or open-ended questions.

Story Structure: Teach your child about story elements, such as character, setting, events, challenge/response.

Summarize: To summarize, your child should learn to retell the story in his/her own words, identify the main idea and include details to the support the main idea.

Video about summarizing stories

Metacognition: Encourage your child to think about the his/her thinking before, during, and after reading.

Step 1: consider what you already know about the topic.

Step 2: While reading, stop and ask yourself: What was the most confusing part?

Step 3: After reading, think about the new ideas and concepts you've learned.

Step 4: Reflect on what strategy I used to understand the text. Did it work well? Should I try something different next time?

Excerpted from the Alaska Reading Playbook.