If you teach or have ever taught 4th or 5th grade, you likely know that many (if not all depending on your students) struggle with comprehension. And comprehension itself is complex, made up of so many different pieces.
One of the reasons it is so difficult is because comprehension is an outcome—and it’s nearly impossible to spend an entire year just focusing on getting students to comprehend text, even at a surface level, and still hit all the other standards. That’s just not realistic.
The reality is we have to find a way to do both: teach our standards AND improve student comprehension.
In this post, I’m sharing how I made every whole group reading lesson into a comprehension lesson—no matter what skill I was teaching. Whether it was theme, text structure, point of view, figurative language—it didn’t matter. These four steps were always part of my instruction.
1. Give a Quick Preview/Introduction to the Text
I always started my lessons by setting a focus and giving students a preview of what we were about to read.
This can be as structured as crafting a short introduction:
“In this story, the main characters find themselves lost at a carnival—a place that’s usually full of fun, but can quickly become overwhelming when you don’t know where you are. Have you ever been to a carnival? What do you think it would feel like to suddenly realize you were lost in the middle of all the noise and excitement?”
Or it can be as simple as reading the title—Lost at the Carnival—and saying:
“Oh, so we already have some clues about what this story might be about. What do we already know?”
The purpose of this step is twofold:
- It helps focus students before they even start reading.
- It activates or builds background knowledge.
This is huge for comprehension because, in just a few moments, you’ll see which students know what a carnival is and which don’t. A quick discussion fills in those gaps before reading even begins.
2. Teach Vocabulary on the Fly
While I explicitly taught vocabulary in small groups and during word study, I always taught additional vocabulary on the fly during whole group reading instruction.
For example, if I read the following sentence in the story:
Without warning, he found himself dealing with an unexpected nuisance.
I might pause and say:
“Nuisance means something or someone that makes things difficult, frustrating, or a little annoying.”
If it’s an important word, I usually gave students a quick task such as:
- “Turn and talk to your partner—what’s something that can be a nuisance at school or home?”
- “Use ‘nuisance’ in a sentence.”
For the word “unexpected” in that same sentence, we would look at the morphemes, especially the prefix “un-” and what it revealed about the meaning of the word. Instead of providing a definition, I would ask students to use the morphemes to derive a meaning and share with partners quickly before verifying the meaning.
If a word in a story was important but had strong context clues, I would use this as an opportunity to have my students explicitly practice using clues to define the word OR I would model it for them.
3. Use Active Questioning Strategies
I asked my students questions constantly while I was reading.
As a general rule, I aimed to ask some type of question after every paragraph. These questions can be:
- Simple to increase basic comprehension “What’s happened so far?” or “Tell me what happened next.”
- More in-depth and tied to the skill you are teaching: “What do we know about the character from this action?” or “What is motivating this character?”
The goal was to get students actively thinking while they read. You can go as deep or as simple as needed, but the key is that you’re helping students interact with the text in real time instead of waiting until the end. This will not only improve students’ mental model of the story (and their comprehension) but will also keep them engaged.
4. Connect Reading to Writing
I always connected my reading lessons to writing in some way.
This can be:
- A quick stop-and-jot where students write down a thought, response, or reaction.
- A more structured response where they answer a comprehension question in writing.
- A graphic organizer that was completed with details throughout the reading (and then used to craft a response after).
To support students, I provided:
- Sentence stems to help them frame their thinking.
- Word banks to give them the vocabulary they need.
- Time to verbal rehearse with partners prior to writing.
This writing connection directly reinforces comprehension. It helps students organize their thoughts, process what they read, and strengthen those reading-to-writing connections.
These are the four key strategies I embedded into every whole group reading lesson—no matter what I was reading or what skill I was teaching:
- Provide a preview to activate or build knowledge
- Teach vocabulary on the fly
- Use active questioning strategies
- Connect reading to writing
By doing these things every single time, comprehension becomes part of every lesson—not something separate that only happens when you explicitly teach it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What about the other components of reading, like fluency and decoding?
These were naturally embedded when I read aloud. When I read aloud, I modeled fluent reading.
If fluency was an issue for students, I incorporated additional fluency practice as needed. This can include:
- Rereading a complex sentence
- Echo reading
- Rereading a paragraph together
- Repeated reading of a common passage after the lesson so they’ve heard me model it fluently and can then practice it fluently on their own
As for decoding, I was doing that work for them when I read aloud, so I naturally modeled decoding. If decoding was a major area of weakness for most of my students, I also incorporated think-aloud decoding strategies. For example, I might have pretended I didn’t know the word, broken it into syllables, flexed the vowel sound, and asked for students’ help in figuring it out.
Do you have this available in your resources on Teachers Pay Teachers?
No, because I varied it depending on my students.
The questions I asked were based on where we were in the progression of reading instruction. If we were at the beginning of learning a skill and I just wanted them to comprehend the story, I might have asked basic comprehension and prediction questions. Later, when we were practicing an already introduced skill—like theme—I would have asked more targeted questions:
- What’s the character’s motivation?
- What does this reveal about the theme?
- Do we have any clues so far?
Vocabulary instruction was also highly dependent on my specific students and their needs.
However, I do have small group lessons that include these components as part of my planned instruction. If you’re looking for structured support, those resources might be a great fit!
What about student talk? Did you have your students talking?
Yes! I was constantly having my students talk whether it was answering questions, discussing a vocabulary word, or just responding to a part of a story.
I used:
- Partner talk
- Choral responses
- Answering me directly
Most of the time, students were talking to a partner before talking to me—but there was always a lot of discussion happening.
Did you do this when you were reading a novel, a picture book, or a passage?
All three!
If I was reading any story to my students—whether it was a picture book, a chapter from a novel, or a passage—I embedded these strategies to help them comprehend the text.
Any other questions? Let me know in the comments!
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