Are you a parent or teacher noticing there is a need for improvement in your child or student’s reading comprehension skills? With the right introduction, instruction, and supervision, you can be assured that your child or students could learn easier and faster. Our five recommended comprehension strategies for kids are as follows:
1) Divide the task into chunks.
When building the comprehension skills of children, it’s not only about being slow and sure. It’s also ideal to let a child comprehend section-by-section. When faced with long and tough sentences, it’s a must to teach children to dissect it. For long essays and stories, it’s ideal to pause every page or paragraph. The benefit of understanding a small part first is that you can be assured the child has a clear understanding before jumping to the next one.
2) Introduce lessons they already know or familiar with.
To improve comprehension of children and students, it is always recommended that teachers or parents introduce lessons or subjects that children already know or are familiar with. Have you noticed that all children’s books cover familiar topics such as common animals, toys, household items, cartoons, etc.? That’s because these are familiar subjects that children can readily comprehend.
3) Associate the lesson to the real world.
Another effective strategy to improve the comprehension skills of children is to associate the story or lesson to real life. It is easier for children to understand if they see, hear, or feel a concrete example.
4) Take advantage of visualization.
The younger the child, the more imaginative he or she is. As mentioned above, children could learn better with the aid of their senses. Take advantage of this by using audio-visual learning aids. In most instances, audio visual learning could already eliminate the need for the teacher to explain the lesson. An even more effective approach is when the child can visualize and just use his or her creative thinking without any material help.
5) Questioning and repetition are very valuable.
Does your child or student still have difficulties comprehending after the initial reading, viewing, or hearing? One of the best solutions is repetition. In general, we all learn through repetition. If you’re child failed to comprehend on the first try, repeat it one, two, three or several more times. Similar with repetition, another effective strategy is to follow up on what they read, saw, or heard and test their comprehension through multiple questions about the reading. Through questioning, you are also refreshing the child’s mind.
