Monday Morning Play N Learn: COMPRHENSION STRATEGIES SERIES

#1 Predicting
Did you know that when you children are reading, they are using multiple comprehension strategies to understand and make meaning of the text? With that being said, many of these comprehension strategies have to be taught and practiced so that your children can automatically use them. Play – N- Learn is publishing comprehension strategies to inform parents on better ways their children can access they text and ways in which parents can be more active participants in their child’s reading. The goal is for your children to be able to think about their reading and fully understand their text!
The Comprehension series will cover the following strategies: Predictions, Questioning, Connections, Visualizing, Making Inferences, Summarizing and Fix-Up strategies to repair comprehension breakdown. It is important to note that these strategies can be used even with little children as you are reading with them at night all the way up to your 5th grader that could use the practice understanding what he/she is reading. The ultimate goal is to for children to have automatic access to all these strategies to fully understand what they are reading.
A prediction is a guess about what will happen next in the story. As parents reading with their children, you can make predictions before your child reads the book by looking a the pictures or using clues from the titles and chapters. You can make predictions during the reading, stopping every few pages to make a prediction and verifying if your child was right or wrong. Lastly, you can make predictions after your child is finished reading the book or chapter talking about what clues help him or her make the prediction and whether his/her predictions were accurate. The following are some ways you can ask your child to start his/her predictions
– what can you predict?
– What do you think will happen? Why?
– When you read _____ what do you think might happen?
– What do you think the character will do?
– What will happen next?
*IT IS IMPORTANT TO ALWAYS ASK YOUR CHILD WHY HER/SHE IS MAKING THE PREDICTION? WHAT DID THEY SEE IN THE PICTURES, THE TEXT, THE DIALOGUE THAT MADE THEM MAKE THAT GUESS. USING EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT THEIR CLAIMS WILL ALLOW YOU TO KNOW IF YOUR CHILD IS FULLY UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT.
In the following video, you will notice the child making prediction during reading. Notice how I stop and ask the child why she is predicting what she is. She needs to use her background knowledge, the pictures and the text to clarify her prediction. When parents are doing this strategy with their children, you can get an accurate idea of what your child is understanding and where you might need to clarify.
REMEMBER: THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF READING IS UNDERSTANDING WHAT IS BEING READ!
Some books I found to be great at making PREDICTIONS are: Frog and Piggy books, Slyvester and the Magic Pebble, The Big Hungry Bear, Enemy Pie, Elmer, This Is Not My Hat, I Went Walking, wordless books (look at past posts), First Day Jitters, Duck on a Bike, etc.
Follow the Play N Learn Facebook page for the next Comprehension Strategy, Making Connections, in posts to come.

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