Building comprehension with 1st grader

[SweetPea]

My ds(6) attends classes at our local school. The teacher there wants his comprehension to build before moving him up in reading.

 

We do daily phonics and reading (I ask questions about reading). Suggestions on materials to help with comprehension? Just checking to see if there is material or method that could help.

[grace'smom]

I've been working on this with my daughter by having her narrate one paragraph at a time of her favorite books. I tried WWE but the passages are just too much for her to handle- her comprehension is just not at that level yet. Sooo... whatever fun book (Little Golden Book or some other such thing) she wants to pick we stop on each page or paragraph and she summarizes what happened. At the end of the book I ask her to summarize the whole book. We do this daily and try to make it fun. If she stumbles I ask silly questions that are obviously not right so she can say "no, it was like this..." When she gets to the point where she can regularly summarize a Little Golden Book with success we will probably move into Aesop's Fables and then WWE 1. We did Aesop's Fables for a while but she got so much more excited about the whole idea when I started letting her pick her own books, so that's what we're doing until she gets better footing. Also, sometimes she has me do a narration for fun and it gives her an example of what she needs to be doing too...

 

I think if they can do a successful narration it meets the criteria for improved reading comprehension.

[Five More Minutes]

From what I've read, comprehension is improved as children are exposed to more material and stories that they can connect together. What you're doing ----- reading and talking about lots of books together plus asking your son to read aloud to you for 15 min a day -- is a solid strategy.