Teaching Kids How to Read

Last fall, I took a graduate course called Reading in the Content Areas. The course dealt with various ways of improving students’ reading comprehension.

The course made me realize that most students are never taught how to read anything other than a story/novel. Consequently, they read their assignments from their textbooks once through, from start to finish.

This year, before I had my students do any reading, I taught a lesson on a simple method of reading for content, based on what I learned in the course. The method is to make four passes, three of which take about 5 minutes each. The passes are:

1. Read the titles and section headings only, and use them to make an outline of the reading. (2 minutes) This gives you the organizational framework that the reading is based on.
2. Read only the captions on pictures, titles on graphs and data tables, the topic sentence of the first paragraph of each section, and the questions at the end of the chapter. (5-10 minutes) This gives you a sense of what the author thought was important enough to illustrate, discuss, or ask about.
3. Now read the assignment in detail.
4. Read the chapter summary. This tells you whether you got everything out of the reading that the author intended. If you don’t recognize something that’s in the chapter summary, look it up and re-read that section.

Today, one of my students told me that he used that method for the long reading comprehension passages on the PSAT. He said that it cut the amount of time he needed to spend on the reading comprehension roughly in half. This meant that he had adequate time to finish the entire verbal section of the PSAT, and he felt good about it.

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