Comprehension employs all of the concepts we have been talking about, and the Pardo article did a good job of illustrating this. The author says that some of the ways teachers can support readers are to teach decoding skills, build fluency, build vocabulary, and build and activate prior knowledge. Those are just a few of the suggested ways, but even there you can see it touches on many of the aspects of reading. Comprehension is kind of the culmination of all of the smaller facets of reading. When we think that all that we teach can aid comprehension it puts more importance on everything! It is good to be a fluent reader, but if you don’t understand what you are reading because you don’t have the necessary background knowledge or do not understand the word meanings, is it really reading? I think it is incredibly important not to isolate the various facets of reading. Instead, I think it could be beneficial to teach them with comprehension in mind. Another very important point is to teach strategies specifically for comprehension. The video below talks about this very thing. It gives tips for using prediction to aid comprehension.
I agree that keeping in mind that all of the smaller steps lead to a larger, more complex final goal is very important for teachers of very young children such as myself. It can be easy for someone to forget how a simple task done with young children can influence their future accomplishments, but when you put in into the big picture these small interactions and experiences are very helpful.
ReplyDeleteFunny video! I think it was a good idea for the Dad to ask the child what they thought about the book just by looking at the cover. This would be a great activity to do in the classroom. Students may have different ideas and if they all are participating they are learning from each other. I also enjoyed the covering up the word and asking them to figure it out. This would work very well if the book was a rhyming book because then they would have a clue to what the word would be.
ReplyDeleteI love the video!
ReplyDeleteThe idea of covering up word before hand because that will really make them use their skills to come up with a logical word. I think it would be interesting too if the class encounters a word they don't yet know to have them come up with definitions before giving them what it really means.