PRINTING INSTRUCTIONS

This guide is designed to be printed single sided on letter size paper and will fit most print parameters.

eComprehend Teaching Guide

US Version ©2019 The Literacy Collectivewww.theliteracycollective.com

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IntroductionComprehension is the essence of reading and the active process of constructing meaning from text (Durkin, 1993). Reading comprehension is a complex interaction among automatic and strategic cognitive processes that enables the reader to create a mental representation of the text (van den Broek & Espin, 2012).

Reading Comprehension is critical, especially when establishing a love of reading. There’s no point reading words with fluency if you’re not understanding what you’re reading. Think back to your favourite novel. I’m sure you loved it because it kept you guessing with every twist and turn in the storyline, you would have been predicting what was coming, inferring character traits and feelings, questioning why events happen and making connections with your own feelings and experiences…..these comprehension strategies are what fluent readers naturally use to engage with and enjoy literature.

It’s true some children will pick these up naturally but research definitely supports the fact that these strategies need to be explicitly taught, especially for children who are not from a non-literacy rich or ESL background. The Literacy Collective focus on 9 cognitive strategies and teach the active engagement of successful readers. The 9 strategies include: Activating prior knowledge, predicting, making connections, visualising, questioning, inferring, summarising, synthesising, evaluating.

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TLC assigns an emoji visual prompt to each of the nine strategies. Each strategy also has an action to promote memory retention of the strategy and skills involved to actively engage with the strategy. The emoji, action and strategy details are included on the strategy posters.

Once students become familiar with the emoji, action and skills associated with each strategy you can use the emoji disks throughout a book where you want students to stop and actively engage with the text. For example, a magnifying glass (Predicting) is placed on the picture of the Sun Smart Sally story and you can have students give their predictions of what the story is about from looking at the picture.

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TLC provide Teaching Guides to gain a deeper understanding of each core strategy. It is important to develop a common language for each strategy. The strategy remains the same from K-6, its the complexity of texts that change as the year levels increase. eComprehend offers a whole school approach to teaching reading comprehension.

To practise and consolidate strategy understanding, TLC provide a variety of Anchor Charts, activities and ideas to support the teaching of the 9 core reading comprehension strategies.

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Explicit TeachingResearch has identified that explicit teaching of a strategy is important for effective comprehension competency. It is important to initially teach each of the 9 strategies individually and then interact and engage with a variety of strategies that are relevant to the text. It is important to teach using a model called ‘The Gradual Release of Responsibility’ following the sequence of: I Do (modelled) We do (Shared and Guided) and You Do (Independent)

I Do - This is the process of modelling - articulating the thought processes to carry out the skill. For example, when teaching predicting, the teacher might say ‘I need to look for clues and make a smart guess about what is happening in the story. I get clues from the picture, words and prior knowledge’

We Do - This is the process where that teacher uses input from the students and guide the students thinking and language when engaging in the skill.’

You Do - This is the process where the student actively engages in the skill and the teacher becomes a facilitator, only offering assistance when needed.

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. Benjamin Franklin

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Cross Curricular Benefits

Scope And Sequence

It is important to note that these strategies are not just for reading but can be used for all comprehension areas of the curriculum. For example, in Science, we can ‘Activate Prior Knowledge’ and make ‘Predictions’. Teaching these strategies can have benefit in all areas as students become self questioners, inferers, summarisers and evaluators.

TLC offer a suggested scope and sequence and texts appropriate for Module 1 (Kindergarten). Please note that these texts are just suggestions and can be swapped for other suitable texts available in schools.

If you have purchased Module 1, TLC have scheduled Explicit teaching of Reading Comprehension on Day 5 as seen below. Follow up of the strategy then occurs during shared reading time each day.

Day 5

Day 1-4

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Week 1: Making Connections

Week 2: Making Connections

Week 3: Activating Prior Knowledge

Week 4: Activating Prior Knowledge

Week 5: Predicting

Week 6: Predicting

Suggested plan for first 10 weeks

Book: The Things I Love About My Family by Trace Moroney

Book: Everybody Feels Happy by Jane Bingham

Book: Little Bean’s Holiday by John Wallace

Book: Senses Close Up by Lorna Hendry

Book: Whose Nose? by Jeannette Rowe

Book: Come On, Daisy! by Jane Simmons

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Week 7: Inferring

Week 8: Inferring

Week 9: Questioning

Week 10: Questioning

Book: The Wishing Stone by Steve Smallman & Rebecca Elliott

Book: The Very Cranky Bear by Nick Bland

Book: The Very Sleepy Bear by Nick Bland

Book: My Adventure Island ...where wild things happen! by Timothy Knapman & Sarah Warburton