How to Improve Children's Comprehension Skills

Comprehension is what reading is all about. A child's academic success largely depends on it. The following article lists some helpful activities that will help your child improve their comprehension skills.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Paper,
• Pencils
• Newspapers
• Magazines
• Grocery advertisements
• Comic strips

1. Suggest your child draw a picture of something special that happened during the day. Write a sentence or two to explain the picture. Do this over several times and when several pages have been completed, staple them into a booklet for reading again and again. Creating their own booklet, will encourage them to read them and thus improve comprehension.

2. Use simple riddles as games. For example, "What rhymes with bed and is a color?" or "What comes at the end of a day and rhymes with right?"

3. Put newspapers, magazines, and grocery advertisements on a table. Ask your child to cut out: things found in a city, things they like to touch, to taste, to smell, things that have wheels, pets, and so on. Paste them into a scrapbook and label each one. At different times ask your child to read these words using the pictures as clues.

4. Cut pictures from a favorite comic strip and number their order on the back. Ask your child to look at all of them and put them in order. Check with the numbers on the back to see if they are correct.

5. Say these sentences to show that words can have more than one meaning: "Are you in a jam?" "The boy flew down the street." "What time of the year is it?" "Take a break from your work." Discuss the different meanings of the words: jam, flew, time, and break.

6. Write parts of sentences such as: a hot day; the beach; cool water; an ice cream man. Have your child make up a story using these phrases. Start a booklet entitled Fun Stories.

7. Write three or four sentences each containing an out-of-place word. For example: "The lady wore a blue hatchet on her head." "The dog chewed a large boulder." Have your child identify the incorrect word and substitute an appropriate one.

8. Ask your child to write sentences leaving out one word and others can try to guess what the missing word is. You can also write a short story leaving out key words and ask your child to fill in the spaces with words that make sense in the story.

Tips & Warnings

• Doing these activities regularly will help to improve your child's comprehension skills and ultimately lead to improved academic success. Have fun and be creative.

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