Teaching Comprehension for Recall and Understanding

Teaching Comprehension for Recall & Understanding l Miss Rae's Room Special Education Teaching Blog

"I Can’t Remember or Understand What I Just Read!"

Sound familiar?  

Here’s a teaching strategy to improve recall and overall comprehension of a text:
Begin by asking the students to visualize (imagine, picture) what they read in their heads as they read, stopping periodically to first, model what you are visualizing (“I’m picturing her face looking angry.  It’s red and her fists are clenched…”). Ask the students what they are picturing. Stop after each part of the story (beginning, middle, end). At each stopping point, ask the students to verbalize the part (beg., mid., end) as they visualize it.  Then, have them draw what they visualized. After reading the whole text, ask students to use their drawings to retell the story’s beginning, middle, and end. Lastly, write a sentence or two next to each picture in order to produce a complete retelling. (Tip:  For added support, give students sentence frames… i.e. In the beginning, ___.)

Teaching Comprehension for Recall & Understanding l Miss Rae's Room Special Education Teaching Blog

​The text can be read round robin style of reading with a small group or as a mini-lesson with the whole class.

Scaffold the approach by gradually releasing responsibility (i.e. allow the student to identify the beginning, middle and end, instead of explicitly stating it and determining it for students).

You can also use this approach with non-fiction.  Vary the strategy by stopping after reading each section, and model what you visualized (i.e. “I pictured the frog in my head changing from an egg to a…”).  Ask the students what they pictured. Then, have them draw what they visualized. After reading the whole text, ask students to use their drawings to retell the main idea and supporting details.  Lastly, write a sentence or two next to each picture in order to produce a complete retelling. (Tip: For added support, give students sentence frames… i.e. Frogs change from ___.)

Check out my "See & Say" Reading Comprehension Strategy:

AND compatible graphic organizer for retellings...

Tip:  I have my students complete retelling sheets after each book we read ...BUT... since paper is a hot commodity along with a teacher's time which can be saved from copying, I place my retelling sheets inside these pockets so I can have them for the ENTIRE school year... yes, you read that correctly!

Related Blogs...
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Visualizing, Verbalizing, & Vocabbing l Miss Rae's Room

Teaching Reading to Special Education Students l Miss Rae's Room

Using Text-Evidence with Special Education Students l Miss Rae's Room

Reading Rubrics: A Special Education Progress Monitoring Tool l Miss Rae's Room