Kriegler Education
Comprehension has a dual personality. Sometimes it’s out on display, but often it’s artfully obscured requiring work to be detected. Even in texts for very young children, words and the pictures work on multiple levels. Good comprehension and knowing the conventions of the written word are advantageous for social and scholastic success. So, what can you do to upskill your young children’s comprehension?
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Read regularly and vary the texts
A great start is regular reading of a variety of texts. Simple board and picture books are ideal for infants and toddlers because they’re sturdy and survive being companionably carted around. Complex picture and chapter books encourage older children to morph into competent, responsive readers. Mix it up with poems, family letters, instructions and recipes. Teach your kinder kids to bake your family’s famous kugelhopf.
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Surface the structural elements of text
Texts have different purposes and children benefit when they understand how a story is structured differently from a letter or a poem. Authors employ universal elements which attune children to meaning across texts. The simplest elements in stories, are setting, character and plot. Also, stories have themes, are told from someone’s perspective, have distinctive styles and tones.
As you share texts highlight some of these elements in a low key, conversational way. ‘Tom is the main character and this story is set on a farm. Do you remember when you visited Grandpa’s farm. Let’s see what Tom does on the farm’. By connecting the story to children’s experience, you engage their prior knowledge and practice the mental art of visualisation. They will often be required to apply general knowledge and imagination to interpret texts. Attune their ear to who is voicing the narrative. Is it a character talking or a storyteller?
Regarding style, you might alert your child to textual patterns. Eric Carle, Leo Leonni and Margaret Wise Brown, all use repetition to structure their stories. The repetition supports word recognition and makes it easy to understand story progression.
As you read adapt your expression to capture the tone of the story. Is it sad, as in the classic favourite Hunter and his Dog by Brian Wildsmith or full of fun like Lynley Dodd’s Hairy Maclary books? These books’ rich illustrations fuel sustained conversation.
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Focus on vocabulary
A text is a tapestry of words. If children don’t understand them, holes appear in the fabric. They become confused about the connections and ultimately disengaged. A child needs to hear a word in context many times before internalising it. This is the same for older children as they are exposed to more complex language. It’s one thing knowing what a balloon is, entirely another knowing what elasticity, air pressure, compression and deflation are. If children don’t understand words explain them carefully and find examples in their day-to-day surroundings to demonstrate their meaning.
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Practice monitoring
Written language builds on itself requiring the reader to monitor what they have been told to any point. Stories range across the past, present and future, but may not be in that order. Indeed, most authors withhold important information and surprise the reader with events from a character’s past well into the story. Help your child monitor and check they have all the important information before going on. But don’t do it so often that is spoils the flow of a story!
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Encourage questions and surface inferred meanings
Questioning and prediction are important comprehension skills. As your turn a page, say, ‘I wonder what will happen next? What do you think?’ You can alert children to the implied messages in the pictures. ‘How is Mr McGregor feeling? How do you know? What has made him so mad? Gosh that Peter Rabbit is a bit of a handful isn’t he?’ If your children aren’t picking up on the facial expressions or graphic conventions like motion lines, speech bubbles, what is in the fore or background or cartoon frames, make the meanings explicit so that they can see how implied information is conveyed. As children get older, their texts won’t have picture cues, but they will recognise descriptions of facial expression, body language and motion to interpret implicit ideas. Authors use simile and metaphor comparing things by dislocating meaning from an original location and applying it somewhere completely removed. Young children benefit from having metaphorical associations discussed in detail. If they read that ‘Mrs Mulligan was like a ship in full sail’, take some time to discuss the imagery. Walk around the room like a ship in full sail. It feels bossy and fabulous.
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Summarise the text together
A vital skill is the ability to precis and get the key points out of any text. Even young children can answer a friendly, ‘Now, what was that all about?’
Most of all – have fun. Reading is our invitation to tour the minds and worlds of others across distance and time. During Covid and beyond, create a reading haven with your child and share books that, as Marie Kondo would say, spark joy.
Lili-Ann Kriegler (B. A Hons, H. Dip. Ed, M.Ed.) is an education consultant and author of Edu-Chameleon. Lili-Ann’s primary specialisations are in early childhood education (birth-9 years), leadership and optimising human thinking and cognition. Her current part-time role is as an education consultant at Independent Schools Victoria and she runs her own consultancy, Kriegler-Education. Find out more at https://kriegler-education.com
