My daughter can read every word perfectly, but when I ask her what the story was about, she just shrugs. She’s 9 and can sound out everything, but comprehension seems to be the missing piece.
I’ve looked into some reading help for kids that focus on understanding and focus, but there are so many options out there. How do you teach your kids to really think about what they read? Any activities or tricks that helped comprehension click?
by OilCompetitive1203
7 Comments
How is her comprehension when she’s read to?
Is she reading books with multiple paragraphs?
I’d get more specific as you’re reading. Rather than one really big (feeling) open ended question at the end, explore the story together as you go. That might help you better understand where she’s at, and if it’s a confidence thing it might build her confidence to speak about her own thoughts. Consider things like “how do you reckon the main character is feeling now?” “if you were in this situation do you have any idea what you’d do next?” “does this character remind you of anyone we know in real life? How?”
Edit to add: don’t be afraid to add your own commentary, so she doesn’t feel like she’s being quizzed about something that should be fun
Could it be she just doesn’t want to (or can’t think of how to) talk about it? I fully comprehend everything I read, but when I get asked “well what’s it about?” my mind tends to start racing and I get stuck trying to sum up every plot point, character quirk, emotion i felt, etc, in a way that won’t make it sound lame or just like word vomit, so I just shrug and say vaguely, “oh you know it’s a (genre) book.”
How does she do when asked more specific questions? What is the story about could be vague enough that she isn’t sure what you’re asking about.
Hey, so I work for Lindamood-Bell and develop comprehension / reading skills for a living. The key piece to this is to start small and then expand out. It’s gonna involve a lot of time spent working with her, but trust me when I say it’s worth it.
Key 1: Vocabulary; does she have a visual image that she can bring up in her mind for the words in the story? If not, look at pictures—talk about what this looks like, what color it is, the shape, size; if it’s a movement, have her describe how it moves (e.g. scurrying looks like small animals moving their feet really fast to run across the floor).
Key 2: Determine first how much she is able to read before she loses information. Can she read a full sentence and tell you all of the what’s in the sentence? (e.g. The little dog jumped on the bed. —> the what’s are the dog and the bed) can she then describe what those two “whats” look like? What size is the bed, color, shape? Dog has curly fur? Straight fur? Size of the dog? How does she imagine this? What does jumping look like? She needs to be able to describe it to you—and if she can’t, you model how to describe it and have her repeat back.
Key 3: Grade level. Figure out which grade she’s able to recall details from most easily and start there.
Key 4: Most of the time, starting out, you’re gonna begin with a single paragraph at a lower grade level (no more than 5 sentences long) and read it one sentence at a time. Take it away after she reads each sentence and have her describe what she imagines based on the text. Once you’ve read all five sentences, go back and have her repeat everything: “for the first sentence, you saw…?” Do it for every sentence. At the end, have her summarize the entire paragraph. The more you do this, the sooner you’ll get to a point where you can have her read two sentences as a time…then three…longer paragraphs, two paragraphs (one at a time) etc. As she gets better at this, alternate you reading without her looking and her reading before you take it away.
Key 5: Goal is to increase both length and grade level as you go. A good end goal is a whole page (3-5 paragraphs) of material at grade level.
Feel free to message me if you have questions—I know this is a lot and it’s all not super intuitive to implement, but I’ve been doing this for 10 years and I can definitely vouch for its efficacy.
My son was like that when he was little. The teacher recommended an app that gave little quizzes at the end of the very short beginner books. It was called Epic! and the elementary school paid for it during Covid and then I paid for the family plan and it was $10-12 a month for multiple child account. It was quite gamified and helped a lot with his comprehension. He’s also autistic so I’m sure that contributed to his needing extra help to dig deeper in the stories, but he wasn’t diagnosed back then.
When he wanted to read comic books I would have him read to me and I’d interrupt him a thousand times to ask him to explain it to me. That worked very well with books he really liked and was far less successful with books he had to read for homework.