How do you improve reading comprehension?

[PamE]

Dd is almost 10 and in 4th grade this year. We homeschool and she is struggling in a couple of the courses. I'm pretty sure it's because she's not quite grasping what she's reading. What can I do on the side to help give her a boost in this area. The curriculum we chose has a lot of reading so hopefully that in itself will help but I'm wondering if there's anything extra we can do.

[AnnW]

Is it possible that she is trying to read at a too high of a level? One of the things dd's reading teacher told me was to go back a level, that yes, she was reading the words but not comprehending. Once we went down a level, her comprehension soared and her reading skills picked up too.

[PamE]

Yes! I feel that the curriculum is at least a level ahead of where she is right now. I can't quite go out and get a new curriculum for the year (dh would have a stroke, lol!). Maybe we just need to do more non-school reading together on her level to give her a chance to catch up? How did your dd handle her schoolwork, if the reading level was above her? Was she able to catch up to that quickly with extra reading on her own? (does that make sense?)

[AnnW]

Pam...she was getting reading tutoring 2 x per week so that helped alot! As far as classroom work her teacher would help if she saw a prob and I was there to help with the homework if necessary, but it was funny, there didn't seem to be a problem when it came to work sheets and stuff like that..it was mainly reading a book and then answering the questions from it. We just brought her reading level down and then answered questions from that. Once her confidence level went up, we noticed so did her comprehension! One of the things I love about our reading program is that they really want to you understand what you are reading....they could care less how advanced you are reading. I have seen that change since ds was her age..when he was that age, everything was "read to the highest level"..comprehension got thrown by the wayside to the detrement of some kids.
Could you, without changing curriculum, maybe do last years at the beginning of this year as a "review" for a few weeks? Would she know that you weren't going on? I thought one of the benefits of homeschooling was that you could slow things down if needed.
Good luck..it's so hard, isn't it!

[Lynda/WA]

I agree with AnnW's suggestion of doing at least some of the reading below level. If she's spending more time trying to figure out the words she'll have less time to spend figuring out the meaning. If she stumbles over words in a sentence have her re-read that sentence or paragraph so she can concentrate on the meaning the second time around. Sometimes she may need to skip a word the first time and then figure out what the word is by using context as well as phonics. Eventually she will just *skip* the word mentally, go ahead mentally, then comeback and read everything aloud flawlessly. For example *I read that book last night. I read every night.* In those examples you can see that a good reader doesn't just take a sentence a word at a time but unconsciously skips ahead. You probably didn't even hesitate on *read*. Because of how rapidly we can read those sentences we may not even realize just what we are doing but a child needs to know that it's o.k to re-read and self-correct. That kind of thing is easier to do when the difficulty level is lower.

One of the *teacher* books that I have is Mosaic of Thought by Keene and Zimmermann. The entire book is about teaching comprehension. It's been awhile since I skimmed through it but I'll try and read some more for other suggestions.

The one that really struck me was making connections between what is read (text) and other things. Text - self, text - world, and text - text. Text to self is relating what she reads with her own life. Text to world is relating what she reads to other things in the world. Text - text is comparing what you read in one book to what you read in another book.

I'd suggest that when you have her read aloud to you that you ask questions. Try and get her to think about what she is reading. Ask her how it relates to her past experiences or other things she has read. Ask her what she thinks will happen next or why things are happening in the story. You could read Aesop's fables and talk about what they learned.

Another thing (not from the book) is to *visualize* what she is reading. For example read a description of a person and have her think about what that person would look like. Then continue the story and have that person enacting the story like a movie in the head.