By Christine, Katlin G, Kailee, Ashley, Brittany and Melissa

 The act or fact of grasping the meaning, nature or importance of understanding  The process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written [and oral] language (Snow, 2002, p.11)  3 elements of comprehension:  The reader who is doing the comprehending  The text that is to be comprehended  The activity in which comprehension is part of

 Developed by the Educational Psychologist R C Anderson  Plays a key role in comprehension  Connects new information with a prior scheme so that students can make sense of it and have a base to understand it

 Background knowledge and/or experience that relates to a text or lesson  Helps students make connections between things they already know and new information  Prior knowledge should always be taught before reading a text  It is important for teachers to check in with the class and ensure that connections are being made for the students before moving forward or concluding a lesson

 Make connections between new information the child is reading and information that the child already knows.  It is important to draw on prior knowledge and experiences to help create meaning and understanding as the reader develops new ideas and concepts.  Text to self, text to text, text to world  Use the K.W.L. strategy

ASKING QUESTIONS ABOUT THE TEXT before, during, & after reading  Activations the reader’s ‘inner voice’  A good reader does this as the inner voice is the one aware that you are reading  Triggers questions about the story being read  ‘I wonder’ …who, what, when, where, why, how?  Forces the reader to wonder about content, concepts, outcomes, ideas and the author’s motives  Deep thinking  What questions might your teacher ask you?  What was the author trying to convince you to believe?

Students’ create mental images to help construct meaning based on text they’ve read or words they’ve heard. Visualization can help transform students from passive to active readers while improving their reading comprehension.(Education World)

 Students make inferences about a text by using prior knowledge and clues in the text Examples:  what might happen next  recognizing potential foreshadowing  reading between the lines  identifying elements of a text  The ability to make connections between the said and the implied is a crucial component of becoming a strong reader.  Ask critical thinking questions to the class at various points of reading a text

 Help students to sift through and find important information  Emphasize important information  Summarize key points with students  Ask students what strategies work best for them and incorporate them to help them infer  If students can read but don’t understand what they are reading, they are not really reading. We need to create ‘meaning’ for comprehension to occur

 Synthesizing is the merging of various sources of information  Summarizing key features  Anticipate from textual clues and generate informed hypothesis  Take stock of meaning while reading  Use sections to see the whole  Generate emerging understandings  Listeners and readers analyze a speakers view on an issue, analyze and evaluate plot lines in short stories and novels and analyze assertions in an informational text

 Cooperative learning involves:  Students working in small groups while sharing a similar task and/or goal  Consists of positive interdependence, face to face interaction, individual accountability, personal responsibility, use of interpersonal and small group skills and multilevel group processing  Through literary circles children are able to learn things they normally would not learn on their own  They are able to accomplish more complex goals

Throughout the reading process students’:  check and recheck for understanding  stop and reread for clarification  read on to construct meaning  examine evidence  check and extend meaning  reflect and set goals for further reading