There is one kind of pupil who baffles teachers: fluent out loud on every single word, then completely silent when you ask what the passage was about. Nothing is wrong with them. Reading simply has two layers, decoding the sounds and understanding the meaning, and a child fresh out of phonics is spending every bit of brainpower on the first layer. There is nothing left over for the second.
Signs a child is ready for comprehension
Don't start comprehension work while a child is still spelling out one word at a time. The test is simple: they should get through a short sentence such as The cat is on the bed. smoothly on the first try, with no stopping to sound anything out along the way. Once decoding runs on autopilot, the brain finally has room for meaning.
Three steps, from one sentence to a short story
- Step 1, read and draw. Give a single sentence: The dog is under the tree. Then have the child draw what it says. A drawing is proof of understanding that can't be faked, and to the child it feels like art time rather than a test.
- Step 2, read and choose. One sentence, three pictures that differ only slightly: cat on the bed, cat under the bed, dog on the bed. Now they have to read every word instead of guessing from the first one.
- Step 3, a three sentence story with Who, What and Where questions. This is Tom. Tom has a red ball. The ball is in the box. Then ask: What colour is the ball? The child has to go back into the text to find it, and that scanning skill is the root of every reading exam waiting further up the school.
The golden rule: 90 percent of the words must already be known
A comprehension passage should be built almost entirely from words the child has already learnt. One or two unfamiliar words per story is the limit. Go past that and the brain gets dragged back into decoding mode, and the whole comprehension lesson collapses. This is why passages should be written from the vocabulary sets you have already taught, rather than lifted wholesale out of an English storybook.