How to Teach Reading Comprehension Skills in 5th Grade
Fifth grade students should have a basic grasp of the fundamental reading comprehension skills, which are predicting, inferring, questioning, summarizing and clarifying. The fifth grade is the time when these strategies are reinforced by the teacher through practical application. For advanced students, the teacher will be able to introduce critical thinking strategies that require a deeper level of comprehension.
Instructions
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Review comprehension skills often. This is important so that the student can easily remember the procedures involved for each skill. This especially helps struggling students or those who have problems focusing. Repetition will bring familiarity. You can review skills informally while teaching other subjects or when discussing a story or book that has been read. You might choose to have a time of formal instruction specially set aside for reviewing or applying skills.
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Introduce critical thinking skills. Once you have thoroughly reviewed a skill, move to the next step, which is application of the skill in a higher order critical thinking activity. For example, have students read a short story or a chapter from a novel. Have them predict upcoming events. Then have them get in pairs or teams and brainstorm what they think should come next in the story. They can complete a graphic organizer like a story web, where they write four to six predictions. Everybody in the group contributes, and there are no wrong answers as long as they follow the logical pattern of the story being read. This is a higher order thinking activity because it demands that the student use what they know from their prior experiences combined with the information from the text.
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Use small groups to model comprehension strategies. Sometimes peers can be the best teachers for each other. Use your reading groups to model the procedures for a specific skill. For example, when you are teaching summarizing, have each member of the group retell a certain part of the story (beginning, middle and end). This will help them learn what details are unimportant and which ones are necessary for the story to make sense. This is much more effective then you calling on selected students in a whole group instructional setting. Students who are shy or who are not confident will be less likely to volunteer to speak in a crowd; however, they may be more participatory in a small group of three to five others.
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Give many opportunities for assessment. Testing knowledge of reading comprehension skills cannot be easily given in a fill-in-the-blank or multiple-choice format. The most realistic way to assess knowledge is to see them apply the skill in a reading situation. This will require more work, but it provides a valid result. When testing knowledge of inferring, read a selected passage to the class, like a part of a story in which the main character is experiencing a conflict of some sort. Before reading how the conflict is resolved, stop and ask the class to think about if something like this has happened to them, or if they know someone who experienced the same thing. After they reflect on this, have them write at least three inferences about what the character will do next based on previous knowledge. If their thoughts follow a realistic pattern of something that actually could happen, you can assume that the student understands the concept. If the student just repeats what occurred in the story or has trouble formulating ideas, then you know you need to model and review the skill again.
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Use advanced comprehension skills in other subjects. When you are teaching other subjects like social studies or science, use reading strategies that will help students to become better readers across the curriculum. The skill of and summarizing is very useful for social studies. It can be used in a writing activity when preparing for a chapter test. Students can outline the information in sequential or chronological order then write subtopics with important details for each section. In science, the skills of questioning and clarifying can be reinforced when conducting an experiment. Students can write "who, what, when, where, and why" questions and then clarify their answers with the results of the experiment. If you weave reading instruction into other subjects, your class will have more opportunities to apply them, which is the only way they will become better readers.
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