Help your students improve their reading comprehension by focusing on specific skills. Certain reading skills will be harder for some students and easier for others. Knowing which skills they struggle or excel at will help you improve how you teach. With these fun activities, you can work on multiple skills or focus on one skill at a time to improve reading comprehension.
Create a Visual Pinterest Board for Your Students
Using images and question prompts, you can teach and reinforce the specific reading skills—all through pictures! You can either have students access the Pinterest page directly (i.e. for homework, extra credit, or for fast finishers), or you can share the board with students in class on your whiteboard. We created a Specific Reading Skills board of images that you can use or re-pin from. (Tip: You can also use these images for journal writing prompts.)
Scavenger Hunt
Have students scavenge their homes and bring to class items or text that demonstrate specific comprehension information. A student may bring a cereal box that claims to have the “Best Prize Ever Inside!” to demonstrate opinion, the instructions to a DVD player to demonstrate sequence, share a painting (see example here) to show inference, or show a YouTube video to demonstrate predicting outcomes. The student who brings the most unique example wins a prize! Have student find at least three of the following: main idea, fact, opinion, inference, sequence, compare/contrast, cause & effect, predicting outcomes.
Color Reading
Select interesting articles from a newspaper or magazine and make multiple copies, one for each student. Assign colors to specific comprehension information and have the student highlight or color the information as they read. For example, have students color two main points green, use purple to show three details, use orange on opinions and brown on facts, etc.
Compro Game
Strengthen students’ ability to recall information, determine the main idea, and find details with this simple game. How to play… Put students in groups of 3-6 (Tip: Group students by reading level to differentiate the lesson). Select one reading passage for all students in the group to read silently. When everyone has finished reading the passage, students should write as many details as they can recall (without looking back at the text). Then, each student takes turns reading his/her list of details out loud. As details are read, each student should cross off any matching details from their list. After each student has read their details, one point is given for each detail not recalled by other students in the group.
Have a Ball!
Get a beach ball from the dollar store and use a sharpie to write each: Who?, What?, Where?, When?, Why? on the ball. Toss the ball out to your students. Where the student’s left thumb lands, that’s the question he/she should answer.
Jenga Comprehension
Older students will enjoy this twist to a classic game. Add generic comprehension questions to a Jenga game: Who was the main character? What was the climax of the story?As you build the Jenga block, add the wooden pegs face up so that students can’t see the question before pulling the block out (Tip: not all of the wood pegs need to have a question written on them). As students play Jenga–as normal by pulling the pieces from the tower–blocks with a question must be answered.
Teaching Materials to Reinforce Specific Reading Skills
Check out these popular Remedia materials to help reinforce and boost comprehension skills.
Specific Skill Builders
Skill-By-Skill Comprehension Practice
Specific Skills Series
Comprehension Quickies
