Skills Children Need to Be Readers By Third Grade

Comprehension
By Christianne Meneses Jacobs

Reading without comprehension is not reading. The ability to understand what we read is called comprehension. Teachers spend a lot of time in this area helping kids to read for a purpose. Reading and comprehension take advantage of the reader’s experiences, prior knowledge and viewpoint of the world in order to make sense of the reading.

It is important for a child to understand the main idea, the details and meaning of the reading. Otherwise, your child is just decoding and is not at the sophisticated level of understanding the meaning of words.

Parents can help by stopping to ask questions about the story they are reading to their child. Ask some of these questions: What is the character going to do next? What do you think it is going to happen? What would you do? What happened at the beginning of the story that can help us predict the end? Also, the majority of teachers suggest that this activity can also be done with daily interactions with your child. For example, when asking your child about the game they played or the dinner they helped prepared.

Have fun showing your child the road to literacy.