Helping students learn to monitor comprehension with the Who-What strategy will be a win for your classroom. It will lead to better reading comprehension.
Have you ever sat down to read with a student and been fooled? The student will read beautifully and with expression. Everything seems to be going well until you ask some questions. When you ask the student to tell you about what they have read, they cannot remember the passage at all or they just have a small unrelated detail (it might be the last sentence they read). The simple Who-What Strategy will help them begin to comprehend what they have read.
A Simple Strategy
Strategies or prompts work best when they are simple. The simplicity helps us remember to teach them, and will help the students remember to use the strategy. The Who-What Strategy fits this description.
To use this strategy you have the child ask themselves two questions after they have read a short text. I normally start with one page. I change up the prompts depending on the text. These are the questions I ask for fiction text.
- Who is this page about?
- What did they do?
First I teach the student to ask and answer these questions while I confer with them or during a guided reading group. Then I work to get them to do it on their own. I typically send them back to read with a sticky note with these questions to help them remember. It works well when you teach them to move the sticky note as they read the book so they check-in often.
The prompts need to change for when you teach non-fiction texts. I ask What and Why questions to help them adapt the strategy.
- What is the text about?
- Why is it important?
Why It Works
The power of this tool is that you can easily adapt it to meet student's needs. For some students a page of text is much to long to begin using this strategy. If they still cannot use Who-What on a page of text, then I shorten the length of the text to a paragraph or even a sentence.
Once the student can monitor during a sentence, then you increase it to a paragraph and then a page of text. Gradually the student will begin to be able to talk about what they have read.
This strategy is helpful because sometimes kids really don't understand that they need to work hard to monitor the text while they are reading. Because I love to use sticky notes, here are some FREE Who-What Sticky Note Templates to print so you have your Who-What notes ready for the students who need them. So download them now.
To give my students more practice monitoring comprehension with this strategy, I created a set of Who-What Task Cards to practice. These task cards have single sentences or short passages and allow students to practice the strategy before they move on to longer passages which can be harder to practice monitoring.
Your students will shine as they monitor comprehension with the Who-What strategy. It will help them think as they read and that is what reading is all about.
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