Comprehension Strategies

For today's teachers, there are many different instruction strategies they can choose from to make up their classroom. For me, I believe that the comprehension strategies are a vital key for teaching successful children, at any age. It is very difficult for teachers to make sure that every student understands their vocabulary words, story's, essay's, ect. I feel this is why teachers need to use comprehension strategies, that way they can help the students interpret the words into language. Around 1970, teachers were told not to encourage comprehension strategies in their classroom. The state board expected teachers to use "decoding skills." Unfortunately, this was a challenge because we all know that just because a child can read a word, does not necessarily mean they understand the word. Over the years, teachers and staff workers have developed a way to produce strategies back into the classroom. There are tons of websites and published books to help teachers gain more knowledge with helping their children understand what they read. Some teachers believe that using multiple strategies can be even more effective. So do I. In my research, I have came across hundreds of strategies that teachers have found useful and successful. I think that students need to be taught a list of strategies and should have continuous instruction on how to apply them. The top reading strategies I found efficient are the following: cooperative learning, semantic organizers, story structure, comprehension monitoring, and question answering and generation. I will explain each of these strategies in detail and clarify how I could apply these as a teacher. The first strategy I found was "cooperative learning." This is were students are allowed to work together and teach each other students the context of a story, book, article, ect. I enjoy this strategy because it lets the students that are familiar with the words or sayings have an opportunity to help the other children that are