As a parent who is teaching their child to read, implementing reading comprehension exercises is a very important factor that you should never neglect. Children as well as adults are very good at giving the appearance of being able to read but when tested for comprehension, we find that very little information has actually been retained.
You can help your child at home by asking simple questions after having your child read a passage from a book aloud. Let’s suppose that your son or daughter just read a passage about Mary giving an orange to her friend Sue. You can then ask “What kind of fruit did Mary have”? or “Which girl received the orange”? Your child’s response will tell you whether or not he or she understood the text they were just reading. Of course this is a very simplified example of a reading comprehension exercise.
There is more to reading comprehension than just asking questions. Aspects that contribute to a child reading for meaning include: synthesizing, visualizing, inference making, information synthesizing and connection creating. Reading comprehension strategies that utilize the above aspects can be the most effective methods to help build cognitive skills and to help your child better understand what they have just read. So when devising reading program exercises for your child, you can use the following strategies in your approach: You can have them predict the outcome of the story, You can get your child to explain to you the main point of the story, you can try to get your son or daughter to see the story through the eyes of different characters in the story, you can ask them to compare the story they have just read with any other story and ask them for both similarities and differences and you can ask them to visualize an image in their heads after they have just read a descriptive piece of text then have them explain the image.
The following is a video and some other interesting information I found in regards to reading comprehension exercises you can when teaching your child.
Related articles
- Strategies for Reading Comprehension for Struggling Readers (brighthub.com)