Applying Comprehension in a Kindergarten Classroom

“Kindergartners Can Do It, Too! Comprehension Strategies for Early Readers” is an article pulled from a journal called Reading Teacher. This journal is available through the Ball State library databases under the E-Journal tab. Reading Teacher is a great source for teachers and future teachers to get ideas of how to implement a variety of strategies, including comprehension, in the classroom.  

As we discussed in class, many teachers believe that students must first learn to read, and then they can read to learn. However, comprehension strategies can be taught to early readers while they are learning to read. This particular article explains how one teacher implements comprehension strategies in her Kindergarten classroom. 

“it seemed natural to begin at the beginning—with activating schemas. Making connections, visualizing, asking questions, and inferring naturally flowed from there."

The teacher teaches comprehension by first activating the student’s prior knowledge, then clearly defining the comprehension strategy she wanted her students to learn. The three strategies that she teaches her students are making connections, visualization, questioning, and inferring.

-- Making connections - The students were asked to make connections of their life to the story. They also had to categorize their thoughts by text-to-text, text-to-self, or text-to-world.

--Visualization- The teacher introduces this strategy to students by asking them to make Mind Movies. This strategy reminded me of Mental Imagery and Think-Alouds that we have deeply discussed in class.

--Questioning/Inferring- The students are asked to ask questions about the text. Inferring requires the students to use all the strategies they have previously used to talk about the possible answers to their questions as well as “I Wonders.” They use anchor charts and graphic organizers to discuss.

While the teacher is reading a story, the students make hand signs signaling that strategy they are using. For example, a child that makes a connection with the story makes the letter C with their hand. This way, the teacher knows what strategy the student is using.

“Kindergartners Can Do It, Too! Comprehension Strategies for Early Readers” includes strategies that we have talked about plus additional strategies we could use to teach comprehension to early readers. I believe this article, as well as all the other articles in Reading Teacher is a great tool for teachers. This article, as well as many others, includes examples that were successful in real classrooms that we could use as guides for our own classrooms.