Have you ever listened to a student read who doesn't monitor their comprehension? We pull a student to read to us and they begin to read. The student reads right through errors that don't make any sense. Or perhaps what the child is reading makes sense, but they either cannot remember what they read. Sometimes these students don't even realize there is a problem.
Helping Kids Recognize When They Do Not Monitor
My favorite way for helping students who don't monitor their comprehension comes from the book Comprehension Connections by Tanny McGregor. You can find this book here. This book gives teachers a concrete way to teach metacognition. It has great lessons to help students understand that it takes both text and thinking to comprehend what they are reading. The book also talks about fake reading (just reading the words) versus real reading (thinking about the text).
I use these terms a lot with my 3rd through 5th graders. I love having the concrete language to use with students to discuss monitoring their comprehension. One other strategy I use with kids is helping them to realize when they are thinking and monitoring their comprehension. I have found that lots of my troubled readers don't even realize they are monitoring. It is hard to do something well when you are unconsciously competent. For example, when a student stops and predicts by saying, “Oh I know what's going to happen.”, I stop and point it out. They often don't even realize that they made a prediction or connection to the text. Making a student aware when they do something well, helps them be more intentional the next time they read.
Stop and Think to Monitor Comprehension
One tool that I use to teach kids to learn to monitor is one I call Stop and Think. I use it when I am trying to get kids to think about the text. I have four basic prompts or strategies that I use for this.
- Point at Difficulty -I talk to kids about how most of the time we read with our eyes, but when you come to a tricky part, it is okay to point. Lots of kids do this anyway but I reassure them that it is okay.
- Slow Down – Sometimes kids mistakenly think good reading is fast reading. The fluency probes we give them can give them this impression. We can give kids permission to slow down to make sense of the text.
- Where Did I Quit Understanding? – Teaching students to stop and find the part where meaning broke down or they started to think about something other than the story.
- Who What – This is a strategy I use to get kids actively monitoring. They ask who and what at the end of a chunk of text. This chunk could be a sentence, a paragraph, or a page.
Monitor Comprehension with Fix-Up Strategies
Fix-Up Strategies are those strategies that I want students to eventually use independently as they read. I demonstrate these strategies over and over again while I read aloud. I do this by using Think-Alouds. Your students need to see you making mistakes and fixing them up often in order to understand that these are strategies that real readers use.
The Fix-Up Strategies I teach students my students are:
- Slow down
- Go back and re-read – They are often really reluctant to do this
- Ask questions
- Visualize the text
- Make connections to what you know
- Look up words you don't know (or use context to figure them out)
- Read the text aloud
- Think about the text
I have created some free Fix-Up Strategies Bookmarks to help students remember them and you can get them here. I print these on a sheet of brightly colored tagboard and then laminate them. Your students can use them as a bookmark or even tape them to their desk or book bin to remind them to monitor their comprehension.
Assess Often for Monitoring
Another way to tell if students are monitoring is to have them write about their independent reading. This helps to assure you that students are monitoring their comprehension. Sometimes students do a great job of monitoring when they read with the teacher, but are doing more fake reading during their read-to-self center. When students have to write about what they are reading, it helps to keep them focused. A prompt or graphic organizer is an easy way to do this, and you can use these Reading Exit Tickets to do this assessment. There are exit tickets for 2nd Grade, or 3rd Grade, or 4th Grade and you can grab them here.
Helping students learn to consistently monitor their comprehension is the first step to helping students comprehend increasing complex text. So if you believe that reading is comprehension, then it is some of the most important work you can do with your students!
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