Link to printable pages designed to complement each reading comprehension
strategy. Students can use the note-taking pages to organize their thoughts,
reflect upon reading material, and look for organizational patterns in
text.
Connect the known to the new. Activate relevant, prior knowledge before, during, and after reading. Connecting a student's existing schema to new schema is a vital linking process that helps to store new information permanently in their long-term memories.
Distinguishing Importance: Where's the beef? Use conclusions about important ideas to focus students' reading and help them exclude the "unessential." Often, by pointing out what is unimportant, you help students to distinguish importance more clearly. Ask them to read and think aloud about their mental images as you guide them to distinguish between images that are critical to understanding and those little details in images that are interesting, but not essential to the purpose for reading. Students can use sensory images to lose themselves in rich detail, gain a greater depth in the reading, draw conclusions, and make text more memorable. Engaging discussion can grow from disputes over what is important. Let children work to defend their positions.
Asking
Questions
Have students ask questions of themselves, questions of the authors,
and questions regarding the validity of text. Questioning is fundamental
to being alive. Questions help children formulate beliefs. What questions
do they have before they start to read? What questions rise to the
surface while they are reading? What questions would they like to
ask the author? What questions will go unanswered?
Drawing inferences in text is the process of combining what is read with relevant prior knowledge. Use this process to help students create meaning that is not necessarily obvious in the material. Encourage them to become detectives, using clues from their reading along with what they already know, to draw conclusions, make reasonable predictions, establish connections, and make critical and analytical judgments.
Retelling
or synthesizing
Retelling or synthesizing requires the putting together of ideas in
a new way. It pulls together the processes of recalling, ordering and
recreating of information into a coherent whole. It invites students
to collect an array of facts and connect them to a central theme or idea.
Giving students the opportunity to synthesize generates a deeper understanding
of what they read.
More Graphic Organizers to Gather Your Thoughts