Comprehension is the ability to understand something. Comprehension is one of the most important aspects of the reading process. According to Taberski in Comprehension from the Ground Up, "comprehension is far more than just comprehension strategies teaching, far more than the formula of phonemic awareness, plus phonics, plus fluency... = reading approach". Comprehension is the base that leads to the pillars of reading. Comprehension is necessary to achieve the 5 pillars of reading. The University of Oregon Center on Teaching and Learning refers to comprehension as "the complex cognitive process involving the intentional interaction between reader and text to extract meaning". Comprehension is essential to reading in general.
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http://reading.uoregon.edu/big_ideas/comp/comp_what.php#what
Narrative Text Structure
3-4th Grade
Sentence-Picture Match
K-1st Grade
ELL students
Perviously in class we have been talking about wordless picture books. We began by reading a book and narrating the book ourselves by looking at the pictures. Now that we are able to read the pictures and create stories, it is now time to work on our comprehension skills with sentences. In class we are beginning to comprehend what we read by connecting it to a picture.
During this activity the students would each begin with two stacks of cards. The first stack of cards containing a sentence and the second stack showing an illustration of the sentences from the first stack. The students would separate the sentences face up on one side of the desk. The pictures would be separated on the other side of the desk.
The students would begin the activity by reading a sentence from one of the cards. After they read the sentence they have to match that sentence to the card that shows an illustration of that sentence. Once the student has match the card, it should be placed to the side. The student will continue until all of the cards have been matched.
During this activity the teacher is in charge of walking around to the students desks to make sure that they are sorting the cards correctly. If the students are having trouble matching the cards correctly, it is the teachers job to talk the students through how to find the correct solutions rather than just give them the answer.
This activity is especially great for ELL studnets. This is because the phrases are to be matched with pictures. Adding a visual for the students is beneficial for ELL students. "An excellent way to make content comprehensible is to provide pictures, drawings and visuals that will support academic vocabulary development. Students at all levels of proficiency will benefit from the use of pictures or visuals, but students at the lower proficiency levels will most benefit from having a visual representation of unknown vocabulary words"ELD Strategies.
Previously in class the students have been reading narrative texts. They are beginning to identify the main characters. They are able to identify the main character because of the basic characteristics a main character holds.
This is a strategy sheet that would be useful for narrative text.
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Each student will be provided with a narrative text and a strategy sheet.
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The students will begin by reading the narrative text provided by the teacher. Once they have read the text they will begin by filling out the strategy sheet. The main questions include: name of the main character, what does the character look like, do you like the character and why, and what things does the character do. This gives the students the opportunity to think about the information they are reading. The main character is an important aspect of the story. When the reader is well aware of who the main character is, what they do, and why, they will have a better understanding of the story as a whole.
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This is important because the students need to be able to identify the main character, their actions, and the main events in a story. This comes with comprehension. Students who can comprehend text are able to do these things. The main character is often the most aspect of a narrative text. Allowing the students a way to comprehend such an important aspect of a text, the main character, can help them have a better understanding of the story itself. According to Teaching That Makes Sense, "To improve your critical reading abilities, an important lesson you need to learn is that stories are less about what happens and more about who they happen to". This means that we should be encouraging the studnets to understand who a text is about. This will give them a better understanding and more ability to comprehend text.
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