4 Activities to Improve Reading Skills (Part 3 – Comprehension)
January 3rd, 2018The Third Improve Reading Skills Activity: Reading Comprehension
I mentioned in prior posts that parents have the power and ability to help your kids improve their reading skills, including reading comprehension. Parents can help their children whether they have an identified learning disability, dyslexia, ADHD, or are gifted. There are 4 easy to implement activities that take just a few minutes a day to improve reading.
- Improve reading fluency in 5 minutes a day
- Improve spelling and learn the 8 ways we put letters together to make words
- Improve reading comprehension by playing a reading comprehension game
- Improve writing skills using specially designed graphic organizers
Improve Reading Skills Activities
The first activity you can do to help your child improve reading skills just takes 5 minutes a day – reading fluency. Research has shown that the more fluid and fast you read, your understanding of what you read becomes automatic and more fun. When you work on improving your reading fluency, you inherently improve your reading comprehension.
Download Free Reading Fluency Training Drill
The second activity to improve reading skills is by helping your children improve their spelling skills (about 12 minutes). The third activity is to play games with your children. The key here is to play games that are specifically designed to improve reading comprehension.
Reading Comprehension Activity
So, the third activity is playing a reading game. That’s right, game playing! Playing The Comprehension Zone, a reading comprehension game, teaches your kids how to read for the main idea and details or sequence what they read does the trick.
So many children struggle with reading comprehension, specifically finding the main idea of what they are reading or finding details that support the main idea or for sequential order. This can be daunting for some students, and not just those students with LD, dyslexia, or ADHD. You don’t have to have a learning disability to have difficulty with reading comprehension. Even gifted children struggle sometimes with reading comprehension.
I think there are times where we’ve all read the words on a page, but we don’t put meaning to the words in our mind. Sometimes this may happen when we are a bit too tired to pay attention to what it is what we are reading, or just not that interested. You can read or hear someone talking, but you may be daydreaming internally.
Think about how difficult note-taking is when you don’t have a clue about the main idea of what you read. Typically you either stare at blank sheets of paper or you copy everything down, not knowing how to pick out the important information.
One of the best ways to help with reading comprehension and understanding what you read is to try to visualize images of what you are reading in your mind. This helps with listening comprehension as well. Often times this is why you hear people say that they like books more than a movie of the same story because they are able to create the pictures in their mind with greater detail and their own imagination.
Play Reading Comprehension Game to Improve Reading Skills
One of my favorite ways to help students pay attention and to really try to understand what they read in a short concise way is to play The Comprehension Zone. This game has 3 different reading levels with short paragraphs about the planets (2nd-3rd Grade), American historical figures (4th-6th Grade), and worldwide historical figures (7th-Adult). Each player reads a short passage and then will answer questions about the main idea and details. You can also play by working on listening comprehension by having someone else read the passage while the player answers the questions about the passage. If you answer the questions correctly, you get to move your player on the board towards the finish. Not only will you help your family improve their comprehension skills, but you will be spending quality time with your children.
“The Comprehension Zone: Rocket Rap had amazing results for one of our children. For our child who has always struggled with comprehension, for these results, I would happily pay double. We’ve tried things similar to this in the past, we’ve been focused on this problem for years, but The Comprehension Zone: Rocket Rap has been the first activity that has been successful.”
Kimberly Olive, Parent
