Have you ever had your child sit down to read something that wasn’t fiction and find that he walked away not remembering anything? Truth be told, I don’t really have this problem with my own kids. I think this might be one of the benefits of having home schooled from the beginning. . .or maybe they just like what they’re reading. But I have run across more than a few people who say that when they sit their child down to read something, or even when they read to their kids, when they ask them comprehension questions–the kids are still unsure of what they’ve read.
I should point out that this method is not for reading fiction. It is really more for non-fiction. This is one of those few tricks I picked up while teaching in school. Many of you know that I have a house full of children and so it is necessary for my oldest daughter to do some of her schoolwork on her own. I have her read her assignments for history and science and complete her four squares and then we go over it later. Here is how it works:
Take a regular sheet of paper with or without lines (we prefer without lines) and fold it into fourths. The first square is for vocabulary words that my child doesn’t know the meaning of. As she is reading, she should write down any of the words she doesn’t know or are new to her.
The second square is for her to list the things that she’s learned from her reading. I generally ask that she list three to five things that she didn’t know before hand. I often encourage her to think through the questions: who, what, when, and where. Answering these questions while reading will often given a good overview of what’s been read.
The third square is for answering a critical thinking question such as comparing/contrasting or ’would you like to have lived at this time.’ For example, we recently were looking at what a typical school day looked like in Ancient Rome and she noted that only boys had school. The question followed: What did the girls do?
The fourth square is for finishing this sentence: I would like to know more about this. . . Since we are studying Ancient Rome right now, my daughter wanted to see pictures of the roads that Ancient Rome was known for.
You don’t have to use a piece of paper but following a similar format like this will help focus times of content reading. You can read the selection out loud to your child and then ask these questions. In any case, this is one tool I’ve used to help focus her times of self-directed learning when she is reading for specific content. Hopefully this is helpful to someone else as well.
Related Articles:
Putting the Grammar Back in Literature
Historical Fiction of the Ancient Time Period