Samantha Guest Blog Post 5: Routman Chapter 8, Teach Comprehension

This chapter was all about teaching for comprehension right from the start. When you think about the main purpose of teaching, and comprehension is one of the most important reasons that we teach. We teach for students to learn and for them to comprehend the material being taught. We are always assessing for comprehension, but we should also be teaching for comprehension on a deep level. This chapter focused mainly on reading comprehension. There were several strategies listed that are key to achieve full understanding when reading. The key strategies listed are making connections, monitor for meaning, determine importance, visualize, ask questions, make inferences, and synthesize. I thought about these strategies in the eyes of my four year old students. Usually I am the one who reads books to them in our classroom so I think that it is my job to make sure these strategies for comprehension is being used effectively. I will often make connections during a shared reading by asking the class to share things about themselves, similar to what happened in the story. I will often have the class predict what they think will happen and make inferences about why before we start reading. At the end of the book we will always talk about what happened and what the importance of the story was. These are just a few examples of how I use these strategies in my own classroom. I also learned that when selecting texts for my students it's important to remember to use texts that are easy enough and meaningful enough to support comprehension. I have to make sure that the texts are on their level to support not only their understanding, but their enjoyment of reading.