Developing reading comprehension skills involves a lot of practice. Though the basic elements of reading, word recognition, phonetic awareness and fluency, can be easily mastered, comprehension is essential to understand any given content. It allows students to read actively, understand what is happening, predict what might occur, relate to characters and apply the learnt knowledge into real life experiences.

Here are some tips that can help teachers improve reading comprehension in students:

• Utilize Different Reading Materials: By utilizing different mediums, such as books, magazines, audio-visual presentations, CDs, etc., children will find multiple ways to gain insights into the content. Make them read the content along with an audio version of the book. This will help them to see the words while learning their correct pronunciation and usage through the recording.
• Generalize The Information: After the students have read a given material, you can hold discussions where they can talk over the format of the content, the characters, the message the writer wanted to convey etc. This way, the students will be better able to relate the content with the real-life situations and, thus, learn the material better.
• Focus On Difficult Words: As students go about reading a content, ask them to note down the words they are not able to understand. Subsequently, you can hold a classroom discussion so that each student can clear his doubts and understand the meaning as well as usage of the difficult words. You can also put up a chart in the classroom in which all these words and their meaning can be noted to be used for future references.
• Define A Purpose: Any given text may contain information that is not related to the essence of the content. Finding the main idea in the content is important to maintain focus and concentration. Teachers should brief the students beforehand regarding what the content is all about. Ask questions after every paragraph to make sure that the students are able to classify relevant information from the rest.
• Take Notes: Encourage students to write down or highlight the information they find to be important in the passage. This way, they will be able to memorize what they have read and quickly go through it whenever needed.

See-N-Read Reading Tools are designed to improve reading comprehension in students of all age groups. The research based tools can help students find the main idea and gain a better understanding of the reading material. For more information, you can call at (630) 236 – 5592.