How to Increase Reading Comprehension in Children

Have you ever asked your child to tell you what they read only to watch them stare back at you? Improving your child's reading comprehension starts with focusing on teaching them intensive phonics. Think about it! Each letter makes a sound. The sounds put together create words. The words have meaning. Put together they have something to say. That's it!

Increase Reading Comprehension Using Intensive Phonics

There are about 44 sounds that make up the million words used in English. Focus on learning the phonics rules that make up the 44 sounds. This is the first step to improving comprehension. One important rule most children have not been taught is the C Rule. Find a word with C in it. Does it have an e, i, or y after it? Then the c copies s otherwise it copies k. This rule is true 99% of the time. Cent, city and cyst fit the rule - c copies s. In words such as: cab, cot, and crib the c copies k.

Increase Reading Comprehension Sentence by Sentence

After your child has learned several phonics rules, it's time to focus on having your child comprehend what they read. Improving comprehension requires that you slow down. Find a passage, book, or magazine article at or below your child's reading level. He should be able to read almost all of the words. Have your child read each sentence, look up and away from the sentence and restate what they have read. You can also cover the sentence with a piece of paper or envelope. Even if, in the beginning, he repeats the sentence word for word, that's okay. After each paragraph, have him restate the whole paragraph. This will help him comprehend what he's read.

I know it sounds simple. It is! And you don't need to do it every day. And you don't need to do this for everything he reads. Do this activity for 20 minutes, two to four times per week. This will retrain his brain to think while he is reading. If you can find stories with comprehension questions at the end of the story, then have him answer those questions after he has read and restated each sentence and paragraph.

Here's a summary of the steps to improve comprehension.

1. Teach the phonics rules that make up the 44 sounds.

2. After your child reads each sentence, have him restate each one.

3. Child restates each paragraph.

4. If you have a passage with questions at the end, have your child answer the questions.

This plan will help your child increase their reading comprehension and have more fun reading.

Reading Comprehension Worksheets - How Should It Be patterned?

Reading comprehension worksheets should be patterned moderately. That is to say, it should not be so hard to understand neither should it be so easy to solve. Some publishers make their worksheets easy for students to pass so that the school admin will continue to order for their products. That is not a good educational practice.

From research, it has been noted that very easy worksheets encourages students to be less serious in their academics and it also makes the students to start losing focus.

Reading comprehension worksheets should be designed in a way that will make the students to do the following after reading the test.

The students should be able to get reference from the passage.
They should be tested in the worksheet for scope assimilation.
The worksheet should examine the students on the ability to recall details.
Meaning of word vocabulary should also be tested by the comprehension worksheet.

CONTENT OF READING WORKSHEET

The worksheet should contain different stories, poems, articles and essays. The complexity of the stories should depend on the grade of the students. The pupils from grade 1 to 5 should be given folklores which depict some history of America as well as some religious myths coined into interesting stories. Such worksheets should test simple understanding of tense and words meaning from context. Story structure questionnaire should also be included in story comprehensions.

In addition, it should also have practice questions about the following:

Fact and Opinion
Main Idea
Context Clues

It's very advisable to integrate so many aspects of questions in one worksheet than splitting it in many worksheets. Therefore, for pupils from 4th to 6th grade the following questionnaires should be added.

Punctuation
Grammar
Sentence Structure
Parts of Speech
Verb Tense

Integrating the above can help them really understand it when they come up in their educational endeavors.

For the advanced level worksheet, some of higher questions examining their level of understanding should be included for them to practice. The students should be able to get from the worksheet the intention of the author, structure of paragraph, significance of passage and meaning of important words. Also for poems we should be able to know if the students have really understood

Making reference
Figurative language
Point of view
Text structure and interactive genre

3RD GRADE READING COMPREHENSION WORKSHEETS

For the third grade to read, comprehend and practice with their worksheets, caution should be applied in its preparation. The worksheets should contain the fundamentals of phonics, the alphabets, sounds, and rhyming.

You should understand that rhyming is very important for the 3rd graders. Therefore, their worksheets should have sounds that will enable them to practice rhyming. Here are some perfect examples of third grade reading comprehension worksheets: