Children Reading Comprehension

You want to learn to bake bread and discover The Yeast Always Rises book on baking. Cosmo arrives in your mailbox and you want to read about how to steal your best friend’s soul mate.  Or, perhaps, you simply haven’t cracked the book and the test is tomorrow.  In any case, to improve children reading comprehension you can easily practice on your own.  This will yield benefits for eventually breezing through your reading with confidence.

Strategies to improve children reading comprehension range from learning basic vocabulary to understanding words in context to speed reading.  Don’t despair, however: it can be simple to improve children reading comprehension every day at home.

Here is a sampling of exercises to get you started.  Give them a try.

Improve Children Reading Comprehension: Building Basic Vocabulary

Read a paragraph from a newspaper or pick a random paragraph from an encyclopaedia.

(1) Write down a word that leaves you clueless and look it up in the dictionary.  Write the dictionary definition below the word.
(2) Write the sentence in which the word appeared just below this.  Now read the sentence containing your mystery word and apply the dictionary meaning to it.  You have just improved your vocabulary.
(3) To truly own the word, write an original sentence or two, reinforcing the word’s meaning.  It didn’t take a lot of time and it may have been fun.

Keep a designated notebook for this exercise.  Make your original sentences amusing and keep it simple.  Now you’re catching on to improve children reading comprehension.

Improve Children Reading Comprehension: Using Context to Assign Meaning

There are times when using a dictionary will not do.  Neither do you want to memorize the whole dictionary.  You want to get the meaning of a word from the words that surround it from its context. You understand the text your reading, but there are a few words that are strangers to you.  You will have to make informed guesses as to the meaning of these words.

You can practice one of the strategies to improve children reading comprehension in this case by reading the sentence in which the mystery word appears.

(1) Jot down, keeping in mind the words that surround it, possible meanings for the word you cannot yet define.

(2) Now read through the meanings, substituting them for the unknown word in the sentence.  Which meaning makes the most sense?

(3) After you have completed reading and interpreting words in the paragraph, verify their meanings using a dictionary.  How close to the actual meanings did you come?  This strategy may seem difficult at first, but with practice comes mastery.  Practice a paragraph every day to improve children reading comprehension.

Make it fun and practice often.  Spend quality time with your child, making games out these exercises. This is just the beginning to learning strategies to improve children reading comprehension.