There are many great books for teaching reading comprehension. So where do you go when you need help as a teacher? Do you go to a trusted colleague, a mentor, a coach? Well, my teacher bestie always said, “I go to the experts.” She was and still is so wise. As a result, that is where I go when I am not sure how to teach reading. This blog is going to review two of my favorite professional books for teaching reading comprehension that has influenced my instruction.
Comprehension Connections by Tanny McGregor
Comprehension Connections is one of my favorite books! As a rule, elementary students are concrete thinkers so this book about teaching comprehension strategies in a concrete way is wonderful. McGregor has a launch sequence for each comprehension strategy that ties the strategy to a concrete object. And moreover, she shares a plethora of ideas for students to practice the strategy over and over as she teaches students to use abstract strategies in their reading. She connects to the strategy through writing, songs, art, and anchor charts. In the beginning, she teaches metacognition to show the students they need to be actively reading to understand a text. In the rest of the book, she teaches the following six strategies.
- Schema
- Inferring
- Questioning
- Determining Importance
- Visualizing
- Synthesizing
In short, McGregor makes these complex reading strategies come alive for students. This book will be very helpful!
The Next Step Foreward in Guided Reading by Jan Richardson
You might be wondering why I put The Next Step Forward in Guided Reading on a list of books about comprehension. It is a wonderful book to help you teach guided reading and we use it every day at my school. However, my favorite part of the book is the Comprehension Modules. These 29 modules teach twelve comprehension strategies. Some of the strategies are taught in a single module, while others are broken down into several different modules.
In each module, Richardson gives ideas for whole-class teaching, but my favorite part is the progressive steps to help teach the strategy to small groups of kids. The progressive steps break down the skill or strategy from simple to complex. In the end, you have a way to thoroughly teach reading comprehension. I love the way she breaks down the strategies into simple, teachable steps.
The twelve Comprehension Strategies in the book are:
- Comprehension Monitoring
- Retelling
- Developing Vocabulary
- Asking and Answering Questions
- Identifying Main Idea and Details
- Analyzing Characters
- Inferring
- Summarizing
- Evaluating
- Using Text Features
- Understanding Text Structure
I hope these book reviews were helpful. In addition, I made a handy guide that describes several more of my favorite books for teaching reading comprehension. Download your free guide HERE.
Ultimately, I hope these books to teach reading comprehension influence your instruction as much as they have mine. You can read more about how reading comprehension fits into a complete reading program here.
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