For the most part, comprehension is something that I do automatically and do not necessarily think about specifically. Both the readings and the class discussion held brought back memories of when I was learning to read and then learning how to comprehend what I read. When I read a book for pleasure or an enjoyable book for class, I will make predictions, inferences, visualize, use my prior knowledge, make connections to what I am reading to my personal life. I will also do some of this when reading text books for classes, though it takes me a much longer time to read the text and comprehend it because it is often technical or dry. I will often have to go back and forth with reading text books because I will forget what I just read or it didn’t make sense. This is defiantly a purpose issue for me, my purpose is to read it for class to pass an exam, but I do not enjoy it all the time if it is too technical or if it is dry.
Comprehension is something that is automatic for me, but it is not something that is automatic to students. They need the framework to start them off in the learning process of comprehension. Framework is needed in the beginning stages to help guide students to take in the information and the main points of what they are reading or what they are hearing.
My 2nd grade class is all about comprehension and discussions of books, whether they are story books, social studies books, scientific books, etc. My CT encourages students to bring up main points of the book, make connections to the text to their own lives, other books, or the world around them. She does this through questions, reading logs, summarizing, making connection charts, visualizing, think-alouds, and writing reflections. I believe that my CT does a great job at teaching comprehension to the majority of the class. I also think that some of the comprehension strategies that we discussed in class would be helpful too in a classroom setting such as quickwrites and K-W-L charts.
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I think you raise a good point that comprehension is not automatic for students. I think your CT has the right idea by providing a variety of comprehension strategies for students to employ. I think doing this reaches more students on a deeper level. My 6th grade class is very different from yours in this respect. They often only get written assignments with little or know diagraming or talking. I think that it's a good idea to remember that comprehension is not a linear activity-students of all ages can benefit from developing comprehension skills by adapting the same tools to fit the grade level.
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