6 Essential Skills For Reading Comprehension
6 Essential Skills For Reading Comprehension
Reading together every day also helps improve vocabulary. When reading aloud, stop
at new words and define them. But also encourage your child to read alone. Even
without hearing a definition of a new word, your child can use context to help figure it
out.
Teachers can help, too. They can carefully choose interesting words to teach and then
give explicit instruction (instruction that is specialized and direct). They can engage
students in conversation. And they can make learning vocabulary fun by playing word
games in class.
4. Sentence Construction and
Cohesion
Understanding how sentences are built might seem like a writing
skill. So might connecting ideas within and between sentences,
which is called cohesion. But these skills are important for reading
comprehension as well.
Knowing how ideas link up at the sentence level helps kids get
meaning from passages and entire texts. It also leads to something
called coherence, or the ability to connect ideas to other ideas in an
overall piece of writing.
What Can Help
Your child can build knowledge through reading, conversations, movies and TV
shows, and art. Life experience and hands-on activities also build knowledge.
Expose your child to as much as possible, and talk about what you’ve learned from
experiences you’ve had together and separately. Help your child make connections
between new knowledge and existing knowledge. And ask open-ended questions that
require thinking and explanations.
You can also read a teacher tip on using animated videos to help your child make
inferences.
6. Working Memory
and Attention
These two skills are both part of a group of abilities known as
executive function. They’re different but closely related.
There are a number of games and everyday activities that can build
working memory without kids even knowing it.
To help increase your child’s attention, look for reading material that’s
interesting or motivating. For example, some kids may like graphic
novels. Encourage your child to stop and re-read when something isn’t
clear. And demonstrate how you “think aloud” when you read to make
sure what you’re reading makes sense.
Baguhin, Gerlyn
THANK
S!
Ursal, Edgardo