How to help my 7th graders understand more difficult books

[TeachinginTN]

I would like my 7th grade daughters to begin reading more difficult literature.  They can read anything but understanding it is a completely different matter.  How do you help your children read and understand more challenging books?

 

Thanks! 

[EKS]

I read aloud a lot from books that were pushing my kids' comprehension.  

 

I gradually increased the difficulty level of the books I gave them for assigned reading, but I had this lag behind the read alouds.

 

I also gradually increased the difficulty level of the books I had available to them for free reading, and this usually lagged behind the assigned reading.

Edited July 18, 2016 by EKS

[Farrar]

Agreed with the above suggestions and adding that reading short stories and shorter articles helped us learn to pick things apart better so that's another strategy.

 

What's their comfortable reading level now - an example or two would help? And what's the goal - what sorts of more difficult books would you like them to be reading?

[EKS]

Agreed with the above suggestions and adding that reading short stories and shorter articles helped us learn to pick things apart better so that's another strategy.

 

Yes, this too.

 

One thing I started doing in the past few years was to find an article that pertained in some way to what we were studying and put it in a Word document with a really wide margin.  Then I put questions in the margin at critical points that essentially scaffolded comprehension.  I had my son answer these questions in writing right on the page while I sat with him in the room and discussed his answers as he went.  The idea was that eventually he would eventually learn how to ask himself the same sorts of questions as he read complex text.  

[Milknhoney]

Yes, read aloud. My kids read books at their own level to themselves and then our read-alouds are usually a bit more challenging.

 

Annotated books are another option. I haven't handed my kids a book and told them to read it on their own that way, but possibly it could work. My ds finished off 6th grade reading Julius Caesar, and we read together from an annotated text. I read aloud substituting the easier to understand text for the original, and he read along so he still saw the original. Then we listened to a dramatization which of course was still the original. He understood it. I would never hand him an annotated Shakespeare and ask him to read it on his own, but I could see it working with other books.

 

Which brings me to audio as a suggestion. Dramatized audio will add to the listener's understanding with sound effects and voice intonation. We listened through Pilgrim's Progress in the original language. I rarely had to pause to explain what was going on. That was partly due to the fact that he was already familiar with the plot from reading Dangerous Journey, but I think the audio helped a lot.