Comprehension Video

The video “Building Comprehension” emphasized that everything students do (such as learning decoding strategies as well increasing their vocabulary) ultimately lead toward the ultimate goal of reading which is comprehension. The video offered many opportunities to see teachers modeling specific strategies to help their students gain better comprehension and allowing their students to actively practice what they learned in the classroom. One of the most important things that struggling readers can do is to model the behaviors which “good readers” frequently exhibit. Some of these behaviors ( as mentioned in the video) include a) being able to have a specific purpose for reading; b) being able to apply their background knowledge to the topic; c) actively engaging with the text and being able to question the author; d) being able to determine the structure of the text to develop contextual clues.
While watching the video, I thought about some of the important things teachers can do to help their students build comprehension. In addition to providing and modeling the strategies the students will use, I feel it is very important to provide the students with authentic literacy activities which gives them with opportunities to build their vocabulary as well as their knowledge base in social context where they can interact with their peers in group discussion.
Some other comprehension activities I learned from the video include:
a) Modeling multiple comprehension strategies for students and allowing students to time practice them.
b) Utilize coaching strategies to help students individually as well providing group instruction.
c) Provide student with many opportunities to read and write independently both in and out of class.
d) Provide interventions for struggling readers making certain they understand what they have read.
e) Teach students metacognitive strategies and model them for students so they can effectively monitor their own reading habits. Use of graphic organizers or picture clues while reading might help students to identify and differentiate between the main ideas and the details of a story.
f) Using mini-lessons to target specific strategies for individual students rather than relying on whole group instruction.

While working with my ELL student this semester, I used some of the strategies I mentioned. I feel that it is very important to connect what is being learned to a student’s prior knowledge whenever possible. The book project we worked on was on the topic of Monarch butterflies. My student was familiar with these butterflies since they migrate each winter from the United States to areas such as Mexico where her family is from. We read a book about the Monarch butterflies together to help activate her prior knowledge and then together we created a graphic organizer to help her organize the main ideas and details from the story. We also utilized a word wall which contained some specific vocabulary terms she would need to know when reading the story.