Comprehension » Starting Comprehension

Starting Comprehension
by Ann L. Staman
Grades PK–2

The Starting Comprehension series is designed to promote reading for meaning in beginning readers. The 12 workbooks in the series are divided into 2 strands, which correspond to 2 reading processes: Starting Phonetically and Starting Visually.

Skilled readers use phonetic, semantic, and syntactic cues to predict, test, or confirm the meaning of a passage. Able readers can move flexibly from one cue source to another, as the situation demands. Starting Comprehension is based on the assumption that children do not all learn to use these cues in the same order, or with the same ease. While most students gradually develop a balanced repertoire of strategies, some children rigidly adhere to one strategy only.

The 2 strands in the series reflect the 2 types of cues that beginning readers may gravitate toward: phonetic cues (letter-sound patterns and phonetic rules) and semantic cues (pictures and word meanings). A student that starts phonetically learns sounds easily, but learns nonphonetic words less easily. A student that starts visually has a strong visual sense and learns whole words easily, especially graphically unusual words with concrete meanings (e.g., pizza).

How you use the strand may depend on your teaching philosophy and the needs of your students. One teacher may select the strand that will capitalize on a child's preferred reading strategies, or reading style. Another may wish to steer a student away from a rigid approach to reading and direct attention to new cue sources. Students can alternate strands, as well.

Children engage with texts and respond to questions on the semantic, literal, inferential, and organizational levels. Therefore, students using this series develop comprehension of words, sentences, and short passages through 4 different types of exercises:

1. Vocabulary exercises introduce, in context, most of the words used in the workbooks. Students can refer to these pages if they are unsure of a word in a passage.

2. Literal Comprehension exercises ask questions about factual details. On the most elementary level, this involves answering yes/no questions or using internal logic. At a more sophisticated level, the student answers factual questions about a longer passage.

3. Inferential Comprehension exercises ask students to identify the correct summary or recognize the main idea of a selection.

4. In Organizational Comprehension exercises, the student relates, or organizes, the information in a passage. In the Starting Phonetically strand, students organize the information sequentially—what happened first, next, etc. In the Starting Visually strand, students organize the information by category—which items belong in the category.

In the later books in both strands, the student identifies the main idea of the passage and selects the pertinent details to go with it.

Most pages in both series contain writing activities that can be used at the discretion of the teacher, depending on students' individual differences.