Reading Comprehension Strategies Teaching Resources
Teach reading comprehension strategies your students can use for a lifetime with printable worksheets, reading passages, graphic organizers, task cards, Google Slide decks and more resources to help students learn to summarize, make connections, draw inferences and more!
This curriculum-aligned teaching resource collection was created by teachers for elementary teachers just like you! Explore the whole collection, and you'll find editable versions designed to easily differentiate your instruction for individual students, plus a variety of options to make ELA lesson planning easier this school year.
New to teaching this portion of the ELA or ELAR curriculum or just looking for fresh and engaging ways to teach reading comprehension strategies? Read on for a primer from our teacher team, including tips on helping ESL students/English language learners build their reading comprehenion skills.
What Are Reading Comprehension Strategies for Elementary School?
As you well know, students don't start off being able to comprehend every single thing they read.
Teaching our students strategies to better understand and retain information will allow them to go from simply recognizing individual words to understanding a range of texts and being power readers!
These strategies can help kids go from the early stages of developing critical thinking skills to preparing them for success in higher education and the workforce. All of these comprehension strategies can be taught and practiced explicitly.
8 Reading Comprehension Strategies That Build Students' Reading Skills for the Future
So, what are the most common strategies for reading comprehension? Our teacher team has broken down eight strategies to help your students build their reading skills.
1. Previewing
Previewing is the process of skimming the text before reading it in detail to get an overall sense of what it is about.
2. Activating Prior Knowledge
Employing this strategy, students draw on existing knowledge and experience to help them understand new information, such as a new text.
3. Making Connections
This strategy focuses on teaching students to connect a text with their own experiences and understandings. Research into the science of reading has shown enhanced comprehension when students can connect new information to information they already know.
4. Questioning
Learning to question is an important skill across a variety of elementary subjects, and developing this reading skill can help your students be better mathematicians and scientists — in addition to readers!
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 you — their teacher — by their peers or by the students themselves.
5. 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.
6. Summarizing
Summarizing is a reading comprehension strategy that asks students to reflect on the text and communicate their understanding. A well-formed summary is made up of the text's main idea 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, teach your students to complete one or more of the following steps:
- 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
7. 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 could also call this "reading between the lines!"
8. Monitoring Comprehension
Monitoring comprehension requires students to reflect on and assess their understanding as they progress through the text. In this metacognitive process, they should be asking themselves, "Is this making sense?" or "Do I need to read this again?"
- Some monitoring 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!
The process of monitoring asks students to identify hurdles and barriers. With that in mind, we have found that our students tend to benefit most if we can connect this reading comprehension strategy with explicit strategies to help them pass those hurdles.
5 Reading Comprehension Strategies for ESL Students
Millions of American public school students are considered ESL students (also known as English Language learners), and it's important to differentiate instruction to ensure their needs are being met in your classroom.
If you're teaching ELA and have English language learners in your classroom, you might want to employ some of these strategies to help them build their reading comprehension skills.
- Vocabulary Instruction — Explicit vocabulary instruction can help your ESL students understand the meaning of key words and phrases in the text. This is a building block of reading comprehension!
- Simplified Texts — Using simplified versions of texts, such as graded readers, can help ESL students build their confidence and their comprehension skills.
- Cooperative Learning — Working in small groups or pairs with other students gives English Language learners a chance to practice their reading comprehension skills and develop their language abilities through discussion and collaboration.
- Visual Aids — Using visual aids such as pictures, diagrams or videos can help students make connections between the text and their own experiences and break down language barriers.
- Graphic Organizers — Designed to help kids visualize relationships and organize their thoughts, mind maps, flowcharts and Venn diagrams can all help English language learners visualize the relationships between ideas in the text.
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Facts and Details Task Cards and Worksheets
Use these facts and details reading comprehension task cards to help your students locate, remember and interpret important information when reading various texts.
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Free Story Prediction Worksheet
Encourage students to think critically before reading with this Story Prediction Worksheet.
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S.W.B.S.T. Summarizing Graphic Organizer
Use this printable SWBST strategy graphic organizer with students to write a summary for a fictional piece of text.
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2nd Grade Hurricane Worksheets - Reading Comprehension
Read and learn about hurricanes with our 2nd Grade Hurricane Worksheets resource pack.
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Main Idea and Details in Nonfiction Text — Instructional Slide Deck
Build skills in identifying main idea and details in nonfiction texts with an instructional slide deck for primary grades.
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Making Reading Connections Using Comics
Get your students making reading connections with these engaging comics and accompanying worksheets that help students link what they read to their own experiences, other texts and the wider world.
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Making Connections Reading Comprehension Passages
Teach the making connections reading comprehension strategy with this set of five engaging short stories and differentiated graphic organizers that help students build meaningful text-to-self, text-to-text and text-to-world connections.
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Concepts About Print Assessment Checklists
Use these concepts of print assessment checklists to check all aspects of print are understood.
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Making Inferences Comprehension Task Cards and Worksheets
Download this set of comprehension task cards with your students to help them draw conclusions and make inferences when reading.
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Summarizing Nonfiction Graphic Organizer Pack
Help students summarize nonfiction texts with this set of graphic organizers.
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Inference and Prediction Worksheet Pack
Download this inference and prediction worksheet pack to teach your students how to confidently distinguish between these two strategies through a range of activities.
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Reading Connections Worksheet Set
Build deep comprehension skills with this engaging Reading Connections Worksheet set.
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Reading Response Templates - Complete Journal
A reading response journal for students to use to engage with text in meaningful and purposeful ways.
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Cause and Effect Comprehension Worksheets
Use these cause and effect comprehension worksheets to give your students practice reading, sequencing, and matching effects to their causes.
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Reading Monitoring Comprehension Activity Pack
Explore easy ways to monitor comprehension with this quick draw activity pack perfect for elementary students.
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Making Predictions – Kindergarten Worksheet Set
Explore the comprehension strategy of prediction using these prediction worksheets created specifically for the early years classroom.
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Making Predictions With Pictures Prompt Cards
Encourage early reading comprehension by using Making Predictions with Pictures Prompt Cards to help students develop critical thinking and inference skills through visual storytelling.
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The Day of the Dead for Kids - Reading Prose Comprehension Test
Read and learn about the Mexican holiday, Dia De Los Muertos, with printable 4th grade reading prose comprehension worksheets.
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Design Your Own Book Cover Worksheet
Design a new book cover and summarise a book using this one-page, printable template.
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Reading Comprehension Strategies Interactive Activity
Use this interactive quiz to review key reading comprehension skills with your students.
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Making Connections Worksheet Set
Allow your students to record their connections to a particular text with this Making Connections Worksheet set.
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Making Predictions from Sentences Worksheets
Practice making predictions with sentences using this set of making predictions worksheets.
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Color-Coding Summarizing Nonfiction Text Worksheets
Practice summarizing small nonfiction texts with this fun color-coding set of worksheets.
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Summarizing Fiction Task Cards
Guide students along their summarizing journey with this set of Fiction texts on task cards for students to summarize.
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Inferencing Comics
Use this set of comic strips when teaching your students how to infer information from everyday situations.
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Making Connections Worksheet
Practice making connections while reading a piece of text with this graphic organizer.
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Inferencing Task Cards
Download these inferencing task cards to help your students practice “between the lines” thinking while reading.
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Five Finger Summary - Graphic Organizer
A graphic organizer for students to use to summarize a fiction text.
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Inference vs Prediction Poster
Teach inference vs prediction with this engaging one-page poster that helps students understand how to use clues and prior knowledge to think more deeply about texts.
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Making Inferences Picture Cards Activity
Use these Making Inference picture cards activity to match text with images and infer meaning using visual details.
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Critical Literacy Reading Task – School Camp Conundrum
Teach your students how to use critical literacy skills to evaluate texts with this engaging reading comprehension project embedded in a real-world scenario.
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Making Connections Text to Self Poster Pack
Explore making connections with these text to self, text to text and text to world posters for the classroom.
- Reading Comprehension Strategies Worksheets
- Reading Comprehension Strategies Templates
- Reading Comprehension Strategies Posters
- Reading Comprehension Strategies for Kindergarten
- Reading Comprehension Strategies for 1st Grade
- Reading Comprehension Strategies for 2nd Grade
- Reading Comprehension Strategies for 3rd Grade
- Reading Comprehension Strategies for 4th Grade
- Reading Comprehension Strategies for 5th Grade
- Reading Comprehension Strategies for 6th Grade