Think about content goals as well as literacy skills, goals, and objectives. You should have a content goal for students to engage them in the text. Also, have literacy skill goals and objectives you can pull from your district and state standards.
The content goals will help hook the students into reading. You must give them a reason to read.
For example, consider this content goal or reason to read for students in a well-known text like Chicken Little.
Content Goal: Read to find out a mistake Chicken Little makes. This mistake led her to mislead others into believing something that was not true. Let’s read to figure out what her mistake is. Maybe we can learn from her mistake to help us live better lives.
Then, you can also have a literacy goal or objective that ties into your district curriculum and state standards. But it would be best to keep the text at the center of comprehension work. Use the text to plan your lesson to develop the processes, skills, and knowledge necessary to work with texts and readers. It is not isolated skill work. Consider how the literacy skill, strategy, or objective can support the student in bringing their knowledge to the forefront.
Susan Neuman once said knowledge is comprehension in disguise. We must help students build knowledge, not just skills, to comprehend texts. Oral language that students hear, speak, and interpret becomes the words of the texts they are asked to read. Oral language comprehension must be happening for it to be translated into print. Comprehension depends on what kids bring to the text and how we continue to develop our language competencies.
Kids must use multiple language and cognitive processes to comprehend what they read. They must:
- Process the language of the text
- Have word recognition and utilize decoding skills
- Understand the meaning of the words, working out the syntactic sense of the sentences(sentence comprehension)
- Understand the vocabulary and learn new language as they read
- Integrate the meaning of multiple sentences as they read. (which requires some inferring).
- Incorporate background knowledge and apply it in specific ways
- Understand what is not specifically stated, along with literal knowledge
We have to help students integrate and elaborate on what they are reading with the lives they lead within and outside of school.
Reflect 