Chapter 6: Comprehension: Frontloading and Downloading

There are many strategies that students learn to help them with comprehension. To turn kids on to the love of reading, they need to be able to understand what they are reading! Frontloading and downloading will help students secure their background knowledge and clarify the purpose for reading. I use many of the strategies mentioned in this book. Before beginning a book, my class previews the text and make predictions. I believe this hooks the students before they even read the book. It also gives them some background knowledge about what the book will be about. Students are able to use pictures, title, table of contents, and vocabulary words to make a well thought out prediction. We also monitor our predictions. As we read, we ask ourselves if our prediction is accurate and change it if needed. I also use the skim and scan technique. I teach my students to scan for important words to help answer questions. This is useful for high-stake testing. When trying to answer questions, students can skim and scan the text for important words. I really like the "Read and Say" activity. It gives students an opportunity to work together and then make connections. During this activity, students can also ask questions and make predictions. Connections is a hard concept for students. Elementary students can make text-self connections all day long, but when asked to make text-text or text-world they can't do it! We have been working on making good connections all year long! If students can connect to a book they will comprehend the book better! Another way to help hook students is to do an anticipation guide. I use this frequently when introducing a new book. I like to do anticipation guides because it really gets the students thinking about what they are reading before they even read the book. It also helps keep them focus during their reading. They are on the lookout to see if they were right on their anticipation guide. To find the main idea, I tell my students they are to use ten words or less. Finding the main idea is finding the gist of the text. What was the story mainly about? Many students can get very wordy when figuring out the main idea. To help them understand the concept of finding the main idea, I tell them it is like a table. The tabletop is the main idea, and the legs of the table are the details that support the main idea. This visual aid really helps the students. To teach my students how to write a summary, I use the somebody, wanted, but, so, then. This really helps them break apart the story and only get the main parts of the story. A lot of the time students want to write every detail in the story that they remember. I tell my students it's about the quality not quantity when writing. Many of my students want to write the longest paper, but they aren't worrying about what the summary is. This chapter is going to be a great resource to refer back to when teaching different strategies. I am an avid reader, and my goal as a teacher is to create students that love reading like I do!