Building comprehension strategies for the Primary Years

Building comprehension strategies focuses on strategies most often used to develop the comprehension ability of primary school students:

• making connections to prior knowledge
• prediction and re-prediction
• visualising
• asking and answering questions
• inference
• retelling and paraphrasing
• summarising.

Building comprehension strategies provides:

• an explanation of each strategy, giving examples of learning goals and success criteria
• examples of ‘talk-aloud’ and ‘think-aloud’ teaching and learning approaches
• examples of deliberate instruction based on commonly used reading texts
• self and peer assessment tasks in relation to strategy use
• advice on how teachers can integrate the strategies in one or a series of lessons.

The accompanying CD ROM contains blackline masters and graphic organisers that can be used for independent, pair and small-group work during instruction, and as part of planned practice and maintenance throughout the year.