Strategies To Help Your Middle Or High School Child Increase Their Reading Comprehension

There are ways to help these students, including interventions and accommodations in the classroom, as well as extra practice outside of school.

Middle and high school students can struggle with reading comprehension for many reasons such as difficulty understanding what they are reading, not having enough background knowledge on a topic, or not being able to read at a proficient level. Struggling readers often feel discouraged and may start to dislike reading altogether. This can impact their education and future opportunities. There are ways to help these students, including interventions and accommodations in the classroom, as well as extra practice outside of school. As a Parent there are strategies that you can use to improve your child’s reading comprehension skills at home to support them so that they can move forward without being discouraged.

Reciprocal Teaching

Encouraging deliberate dialogue with reciprocal teaching is one of the best ways to learn something. It is an instructional activity in which learners take on the role of instructor. Take some time to review a document with your child and have them take the lead on the review; this will force them to explain their understandings of the text as you review it together.

Summarizing Text

A summary of your child’s work reflects the story they read or portray. The aim is to get them to explain their thoughts. Then, they must isolate the main ideas and consolidate the core components of the text. Have your child read a text and provide you with a summary that you can review together to ensure that they included the most important ideas in the summary.

Predicting The Events In A Text

You can encourage your child to predict a story's outcomes by asking questions based on the title and other details available, including illustrations and text. You can also extend this activity by requesting that after your child reads the text that they tell you whether or not their predictions were right and ensure that they show you the evidence in the text to support their claim.

Engaging In Questioning

Questioning ensures that your child is actively researching and analyzing texts and that they aren’t simply passively going through them, helping develop the capacity for critical thinking. By encouraging your child to think, you aid their comprehension of the specific content. Ask them a variety of questions, some simple and others more complex to really keep them on their toes.

By taking about 30 minutes per day or a dedicated period of time on the weekend with one of these strategies consistently, you will start to see your child’s comprehension of text improve and with it, their confidence. We all know how critical reading is for our children to be successful, so even if they are older, if they are still struggling with reading comprehension it is not too late to offer them support in this area. If you are not a teacher, you may not be familiar with strategies that educators use to help children improve their reading skills. The strategies above are a few that are consistently used in schools for this purpose. You can also always feel free to reach out to your child’s teacher for support or recommendations as to what you can do at home to support what your child is learning in the classroom.