Think About It!

How to Help Your Kids Read it and Get it!

Thinking is the Key

to Understanding

I Love the Look of Words

I love the book and the look of wordsThe weight of ideas that popped into my mind

I love the tracksOf new thinking in my mind.

-Maya Angelou

Comprehension Strategies

Real comprehension has to do with thinking, learning, and expanding a reader’s

knowledge and horizons.Good readers use the following comprehensionstrategies to unlock meaning:

1.Visualize2. Make Connections3. Ask Questions4. Infer5. Determine Importance6. Synthesize

Visualizing

Visualizing and Creating Sensory

Images

• I see,hear,taste,feel and smell what I read.

•Visualizing helps me to understand what I read.

Tips for Creating Sensory Images

1. You can help your child enormously by sharing your own sensory images.

2. Ask your child what they see, hear, feel, see or might taste throughout the reading.

3. Ask your child to close their eyes as you read a sentence, a paragraph or a page from the book. Stop and describe in as great detail as possible. Switch.

4. Draw pictures after the story.5. Act out what you read.6. Compare your images and feelings with

your child's.

Making Connections

Background knowledge is all that you bring to a book: your personal

history, all you’ve read or seen, your adventures, the experiences

of your day to day life, your relationships, your passions.

Making Connections• Text to Self: between something you’ve

read and something from your personal life.

• Text to Text: between what you’re reading and something you’ve read or seen or heard, such as a painting, movie, television program, or song.

• Text to World: between what you’ve read and the boarder world. These are often bigger “idea” connections.

Tips for Making Connections

1. Encourage your child to connect their lives to books at any time.

2. Be an interactive reader and personalize the experience.

3. Always discuss the book before, during and after the reading by talking about family experiences.

4. Connect to the characters. How are you alike or different?

Questions help a reader clarify ideas and deepen understanding.

Asking Questions

Quality QuestionsYoung children are master

questioners. In their quest to make sense of their world, they bombard

those around them.

When reading, children try to figure things out, they try to put the pieces

together.

Tips to Encourage Questioning

1. Choose quality, rich picture books that have sophisticated content.

2. Ask questions before, during and after you read.

3. Ask questions where you have to seek other sources for the answer.

4. Always ask what they are thinking after the question is asked.

5. Let one question led to another.6. Ask questions about the author.

InferringWhen the mind is thinking, it’s talking to itself. Plato

Reading Between the Lines

Look for Clues

•Listen to the words and phrases•Look at the picture •Use your background knowledge and understanding to infer words and meaning.

PredictingA Simple But Critical Concept

• Predicting raises questions about what is to come

• Predicting will confirm or dismiss old predictions and make new

ones.

• When you predict based on clues, you prepare to uncover new ideas and begin to draw conclusions about larger ideas in the story.

Tips to Promote Inferring• Offer your own predictions before

during and after you read.• Always encourage and share the

thinking behind your decisions.• Predict and infer beyond books.• Play word games (I spy,Charades).• Look for clues in the book together• Look for meanings beyond the

words.

Determining Importance

dimensions. A mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original.

• Determining importance has to do with knowing why you’re reading and then making decisions about what information or ideas are most critical to understanding the overall meaning of the piece.

• Knowing your purpose for reading is a big factor in determining what’s important when you read. It affects how carefully you read and has an impact on what you determined to be important.

Synthesizing

Putting It AllTogether

• Information alone in meaningless. It has to be thought about, organized and then internalized, then you end up with knowledge.

• Basically, we identify what’s important and then add our own personal thoughts to form a perspective.

Tips to Foster Determining Importance and

Synthesizing

• When possible, ask why you chose or are reading a particular book.

• Look for new facts • Use the text features on the page

i.e. bold print, glossary, captions etc.

• Retell the most important parts of the story.

• Let the words spark a conversation.• Ask, “What does it mean to me?”

Happy Reading