Reading comprehension

     In this blog entry, I would like to share with you with one of the toughest lessons that I conducted through practice. It was a lesson in grade four about reading comprehension. Children read a text, learn new words, answer questions and also try to predict alternative endings to the story. 

     We started the lesson with a warm-up. We were sitting on the carpet and we revised vocabulary connected with a family with the use of flashcards. After that, we made a lead-in to the new reading. The title of the reading was "Magic Jane". It was a story about Jane's parents' divorce and her love for reading books. After that, we made a lead-in to the new reading. We talked about the picture that was included in the text and children guessed the topic of the story. After that children read the text and we started to talk about the story. We explained new vocabulary by asking them if they know what they mean. If they didn't know we were giving them definitions also in English. We asked questions about the main character, about their family, feelings and so on, but children didn't answer all of them. They understood them but sometimes they had a problem with finding answers in the text. To answer they needed to think and interpret the text. To make them think we needed to change our questions and give them hints. It wasn't easy because we couldn't say too much because it would give them a clear answer. With this activity, we needed the help of our mentor teacher. She knew how to do that and how to make children talk. Her questions were constructed in the way that children started thinking and they answered. After talking, children went back to their sits. The text didn't have an ending so children needed to draw pictures to the story with one additional with the ending that they made up. At the next lesson, they will need to talk about these pictures. 

     I didn't think that teaching reading comprehension may be so hard. We need to learn how to construct good questions and make children think and also how to give good hints without revealing too much. I hope that we will have the opportunity to try again because it is a good teaching experience.