Fourth-Grade Reading Comprehension Games
When you announce to your students that you will be playing a game, the classroom atmosphere immediately becomes enthusiastic. Use games to help your fourth-grade students improve their reading comprehension. The students will be motivated, and you will be able to informally assess the students' reading skills.
Other People Are Reading
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Human Time Line
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Take the main events from a chronological article or story and record each event individually on a sentence strip. Give each sentence strip to a student and have the students work together to sequence the events and create a human time line of the story. If there are not enough sentence strips for each student, let the other students rearrange the time line by directing students where to move the strips. Alternatively, create two or more sets of the events (color coded for organization) and compare the results of the different groups.
Jeopardy Review
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After reading a book or longer selection, create reading comprehension questions to make a Jeopardy game. Come up with questions that require basic recall knowledge for the lower point values. Use questions that require students to analyze and evaluate the text for questions worth more points. Make an online version of the game that students can practice at home for further review.
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Guess Who?
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Break the class into groups and assign each group a character from the story or book being read. The group must analyze the character traits of the assigned character and then create a skit to perform for the class. However, the skit must be silent and contain no words. The class watches each group's skit and guesses which character is being portrayed.
Fact and Opinion
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When reading a persuasive piece of writing, give each student in the classroom two sheets of paper---one labeled fact and one labeled opinion. When directed by the teacher to hold up a card, the students reread the last statement and hold up a card to identify it as fact or opinion. Students can keep a personal score based on how many questions they answered correctly.
Question and Answer Search
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Before class begins, create a variety of reading comprehension questions. Write each question on a separate index card and create an answer card for each question. You should have roughly the same number of cards as students in your class. During class, give each student a card. The students must work together to pair the questions with the correct answers. Provide students with behavior guidelines and a set time frame. After the time is up, have the class share the questions and answers in a whole class discussion.
Online Games
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In addition to teacher-directed classroom games, consider using online games. These games can be used in the computer labs, classroom work stations, or on an interactive whiteboard to improve fourth-grade reading comprehension (see Resources).
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