Teaching a Child to Read for Maximum Comprehension

Encourage your child to set a goal before beginning. Previewing a text before reading helps readers develop goals for their reading session. For example, if your child needs to answer a series of questions about a passage or textbook chapter, encourage them to look at the text’s organization to note where the most relevant information might be based on what they need or want to learn. Because textbooks are dense with information, this process will help your child navigate content more effectively and retain what they read in class and as homework. 

“Check in” after every page. Self-monitoring is essential to comprehension, so encourage your child to pause after each page (or more frequently if needed) to glance over its contents and make sure they understand what it says. It can be helpful when reading a textbook to jot down important notes or main points on notecards (or sticky notes to place within the book’s pages). If reading together, ask your child periodically what a passage said and what didn’t make sense (if applicable).

Use the text to answer questions. Part of effective comprehension monitoring is knowing when to seek further information. If a text references an unfamiliar or confusing topic, encourage your child to flip through the chapter to see if the topic will be discussed later. If reading a textbook with an index, your child should look up unfamiliar terms.  

Take notes or map it out. Visual aids can be very helpful as students attempt to follow a plot of a story, organize ideas and make connections. Talk with your child’s teacher about story maps, cause and effect charts or other visual tools that might aid your child’s comprehension as they read. Also, remind your child not to gloss over graphics within a textbook. These are meant to summarize information and can help make complicated information more digestible.

Summarize at the end of a section. After each natural section or chapter, encourage your child to take a moment to confirm their understanding of the main takeaway, supporting information, extraneous information and anything unexpected that they learned.

Take time to reflect. When your child finishes reading, reflection is a beneficial exercise. After reading a textbook chapter, your child should refer back to the notecards or sticky notes on which they wrote important points. Also encourage your child to consider doing additional research on lingering questions. For example, a famous baseball player whose name is mentioned in an article about baseball might spark your child’s interest to learn more by searching online or at the library.

If your continued efforts to build your child’s reading comprehension do not seem to yield positive results, there might be something else going on. Factors such as a lack of basic reading skills like decoding and fluency can make it difficult, if not impossible, for your child to grasp what they read. If your child is struggling with reading in general, call Huntington. We can help get to the root of the problem and help your child become a more capable, confident reader.