Teaching Reading Comprehension

In my Jan 18 blog I talked about how I saw great improvement when kids were given time to read at their just right level. This makes sense to me. The more you do something the better you get at it. But as both Routman and Tovani point out, this practice needs to be focused. You need to be reading books that aren’t too easy or too hard and you need to be making sense of what you are reading. In order to do that, students need to be taught comprehension strategies and then practice applying these during independent reading.

I found it interesting how similar the strategies were that Tovani talked about for older readers to the ones Routman talked about in Chapter 8. So I’m wondering if we teach these strategies to young readers will they be better adolescent readers or do they need further instruction in applying the strategies to more difficult materials? From the example given of Tovani’s class that read Dante’s Divine Comedy, it seems kids need continued reading instruction. Even Tovani’s A and B students struggled to make meaning out of Divine Comedy. This makes me think that no matter what grade I am teaching, I need to teach reading comprehension strategies that fit the material we are covering, whether that be social studies, science, or literature. It makes sense that we can continually become better readers, but wasn't something I had really thought about before. Now I'm wondering if my own teenage daughters could use some instruction on reading comprehension strategies to help them with their homework. I wonder when the last time was that a teacher taught them reading?