More on comprehension

Historically, comprehension instruction has been nonexistent.  Comprehension was tested and never taught.  I can sort of understand, as an adult reader, I don't need to explicitly tell myself to comprehend and I'm not sure how I learned to do it either.  Now that I have the skill, I just use it.  But new readers have so many other things to focus on while they read, such as decoding, that comprehension does not just come naturally.  Anne Gregory and Mary Cahill had some good things to say about teaching comprehension.

The Comprehension Matrix:

• the reader, the text, and the situation all affect the comprehension.
• Pre-reading, during-reading, and post-reading activities can be employed to actively aid in showing children how to comprehend a text. 

This organization of teaching comprehension is a simplistic and helpful way to keep in mind everything we need to be aware of and teaching our kids to actively engage in while reading.

And who knew? Kindergarteners can do it too

The little ones can begin to hone comprehension skills too, as evidenced in Mrs. Hope's classroom in the article, it just looks different.  The Kindergarten children exercise comprehension in a more visible way (they used hand signals), but they were able to ask questions, tell stories that made connections, and even infer.

Here is Kitty Connector,

Not sure what the cat has to do with anything, but these are great questions to ask.

What would be good strategies to use in a social studies lesson, that would help the children focus on comprehending the social studies text for the day?