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How To Read For Meaning
How To Read For Meaning
Children should not be taught HOW TO READ, but instead HOW TO READ FOR MEANING. Reading is an essential part of our lives. When we show students how to use metacognition to better understand text, they are gaining skills for a lifetime of learning.
Children need to use schema (background knowledge). They need to make inferences, as they read. They should also use questioning techniques to analyze their texts. They need to be taught how to determine importance of the texts, so that they can eliminate unnecessary information. Visualization is also crucial to comprehension. Being able to picture the events in the story aids in comprehension. Finally, Children need to learn how to synthesize. Synthesizing is all about bringing everything together to see the "big picture" in order to make sense of it all.
Students can be taught these skills, even before they are able to read the words on a page. Modeling these techniques shows them what "real readers" do.
Giving children the opportunity to look at pictures in a book, then talking to them about what is happening in those pictures can help them to become successful readers.
You can help students build background knowledge introducing pictures and video related to the texts, prior to reading. Having conversations about different places or things in your environment is another great way to build background knowledge. Reading other books or texts on a particular topic can also help. Traveling to new places would be another way to broaden student knowledge, but this isn't always possible. You can always take a tour to a new place using Google Earth, a globe, or a map. Study the location, the culture, the wildlife or historical events that happened there.
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