Reading Comprehension Skills Teaching Resources

Explore printable worksheets, digital activities and more to teach reading comprehension strategies in your elementary classroom. Created by teachers, for teachers, the teaching resources in this collection are curriculum-aligned and have undergone a careful review by a member of our expert teaching team.

You'll find editable versions to easily differentiate your instruction for individual students, plus a variety of options to make lesson planning easier this school year!

New to teaching this portion of the English curriculum or just looking for fresh and engaging ways to teach reading comprehension strategies? Read on for a primer from our teacher team!

What Is Reading Comprehension?

We'll start at the beginning! Reading comprehension is a skill that's hard to overestimate in terms of its importance for elementary students to develop.

Defined as the ability to understand and interpret written language, reading comprehension involves the process of decoding text, extracting meaning from it, and then integrating that meaning with prior knowledge and understanding.

Not only does comprehension comprise the ability to recognize and understand individual words, but it also involves the ability to recognize patterns and relationships within sentences and paragraphs, as well as the ability to make inferences and draw conclusions based on the information presented.

To develop reading comprehension, students need a variety of language skills such as vocabulary knowledge, grammar, and syntax, as well as cognitive processes such as attention, memory, and critical thinking.

So how do they get there? Let's talk strategies!

What Are Reading Comprehension Strategies?

As you well know, students don't start off being able to comprehend every single thing they read. But teaching them strategies to better understand and retain information will allow them to go from recognizing individual words to understanding a range of texts.

Some common reading comprehension strategies include:

Previewing — This is the process of skimming the text before reading it in detail to get an overall sense of what it is about.
Activating Prior Knowledge — Students can draw on existing knowledge and experience to help them understand new information, such as a new text.
Making Connections — This strategy focuses on teaching students to make connections between a text and their own experiences and understandings. Research into the science of reading has shown enhanced comprehension when students are able to connect new information to information they already know.
Questioning — In this comprehension strategy, students ask and answer questions to clarify the meaning of the text and deepen their understanding. When you center questioning activities around the familiar open-ended prompts of who, what, when, where, how, why and which, students assert their understanding and identify any gaps in their comprehension of the text. Questions can be posed by a teacher, by their peers or by the students themselves.
Visualizing — Visualization provides both teachers and students with another means to extend their exploration of a text and deepen understanding. This reading comprehension strategy asks students to create and describe an image in their mind, centered around a place, situation, or character in the text. Visualizing has been proven in research to improve student recall! Using the five senses is a great way to scaffold student comprehension through visualizing.
Summarizing — Summarizing is a reading comprehension strategy that asks students to reflect on the text and communicate their understanding of it. A well-formed summary is made up of the main idea of the text and the key details that support the main idea, showing that the student has understood what they’ve read well enough to write a summary that’s not merely a repetition of the text.
- When summarizing, students may complete one or more of the following:
  - Recount the text in their own words
  - Identify the main idea, topic or purpose
  - List key words or phrases
  - Identify structural elements of the genre
- Using the SWBST process can help students with this reading comprehension strategy. The steps in the SWBST process are:
  - Somebody
  - Wanted
  - But
  - So
  - Then
Inferring — The process of drawing conclusions based on clues or evidence presented in the text is called inferring, and it involves readers using what they know and pairing it with what they read in the text to make a conclusion. You might also call this "reading between lines!"
Monitoring Comprehension — When monitoring comprehension, students reflect on and assess their understanding as they progress through the text. In this metacognitive process, students may ask themselves questions like "Is this making sense?" or "Do I need to read this again?"
- Some comprehension strategies that may be effective may include going back to reread a section of a text, slowing down or speeding up your reading rate, and using text features to help understand difficult parts of a passage. All of these are active reading strategies that students can do to help them better understand what they are reading, while they are reading!
- While the process of monitoring asks students to identify hurdles and barriers, students also benefit from connecting this reading comprehension strategy with explicit strategies to help them pass their hurdles.