eading is the foundation for all education. Practicing and exposing a child to a variety of reading opportunities is key to developing a successful reader. But simply being able to read lines of texts doesn't necessarily translate to understanding. E-School's Reading course supports the development of reading comprehension skills with age-appropriate and interesting articles/stories.
Then what is reading comprehension? It is the readers' cognitive ability to process text, understand its meaning, decipher the author's intention and assimilate it into what they already know. Helping young readers develop the different types of reading skills is a challenging task, especially as they encounter an increasing variety of texts. By providing carefully selected age-appropriate passages from different genres, this course provides an environment where young readers can develop and practice essential comprehension skills at their own pace. We encourage readers not just to read, but to pick out key information essential to reading specific kinds of texts.
As the students progress through the levels, they will encounter a greater variety of skills and texts while continuing to practice previously learnt skills at a more difficult level to ensure mastery. This course adopts questioning, a powerful meta-cognitive strategy of improving readers' comprehension skills. Readers will read passages (both short and relatively long), followed by questions about the passage to assess their understanding.
This course also extensively employs Cloze - an instructional strategy where readers are required to fill in the blanks within a passage with the correct words. Cloze is very effective in developing the semantic and syntactic skills of students in understanding new vocabularies, in the context of the sentences and passages where the words appear. Scroll down the list below to find out more about the comprehension skills your child will learn to develop in this course:
Specifically designed for Year 1 students, this course exposes very young readers to interesting stories or articles - they will then be asked simple questions to check their comprehension of what they have just read. The questions are: Who was the story about? What happened and what went down? When did the story happen? Where did the story take place? How did things happen and work out? Why did it all come about?
For Year 2 to 8 students, they will learn to develop the following comprehension skills:
Understanding the main idea of a passage means being able to have a broad overall understanding of what the passage is about. Readers who are adept at identifying main ideas are able to make better sense of a text and increase their comprehension of what is being communicated. Readers are also practicing to find out additional supporting information from other passages which concur with the main idea and help the reader better understand the main passage.
Contextual clues are words or sentences in the passage which help the reader determine the meaning of a new word or unfamiliar vocabulary. Being able to use contextual clues to make accurate estimations of unfamiliar words or phrases is essential in helping a reader better understand what is being communicated in a text. Very often, writers may use words that are unfamiliar to readers. However, there are often clues in the rest of the text that point to what that word means. Readers need to be able to sift out those clues to make sense of the text. This is especially the case when the writer does not explicitly provide the definition of the word in the passage.
Sequencing means putting the events mentioned in the passage in the order they happened. Knowing the sequence of events is an important, often critical, factor in a reader's understanding of a text. In determining the order in which events occur, readers need to be familiar with time markers such as before, then, when, while, after, during, following, etc.
Making predictions involves readers finding out information from the passage to determine what will happen next. A reader who can think ahead to determine what may happen next or how an event may turn out gains a richer understanding of a text. This section helps your child learn to make reasonable predictions and anticipate possible future events. This section provide opportunities for your child to guess what is likely to happen based on information that he/she already knows, as well as the information in the text.
A fact is information that can be proven - for example, New Zealand is part of Australasia. An opinion is information that is based on what someone thinks or believes, and is a kind of judgment - for example, New Zealand is the most beautiful country in Australasia. A reader who can differentiate between statements of fact and opinion is better able to analyse and assess a text.
To compare and contrast ideas in a passage, a reader determines how the ideas are alike and how they are different. This skill enriches a reader's understanding of the text. A reader who can compare and contrast events, characters, places and facts is able to identify similarities and differences, and is able to categorise and group information.
Summarising identifies the most important points in a text and makes sense of what is being communicated in a text by differentiating essential information from extra detail. Very often, writers provide extra detail to further illustrate what they mean, but these details are not always necessary in conveying the essential message of the passage. This is where summarizing is important. Readers are required to condense the information that they read and to restate the ideas in the text using a concise set of words and/or phrases.
Inferring is the process of mentally filling in information that is unstated to make sense of a passage - for example, figuring out what is happening in a story from clues that the author provides. Very often a text may not include every fact or detail about a topic. Readers need to draw upon their own knowledge or experiences to make sense of what is stated in a text.
Being able to draw logically sound conclusions from the information provided in a text helps readers to derive meaning from language with layers of implied meaning. The skill of drawing conclusions is related to that of making inferences, particularly when a text does not state every piece of information explicitly. Readers have to piece together the clues that the writer provides and then draw the best conclusions they can to understand the text.
The writer's point of view is his/her opinion about a subject. A reader should, after careful and detailed analysis of what has been written, understand and be able to identify the point of view expressed in the text. This information can be explicit, but is often implicit instead. The writer's purpose for writing explains why the text was written. It may be to express a particular point of view, to amuse, to entertain, to inform, to persuade, to instruct, to record information or to explain something. Students should be encouraged to work out how and what the writer was thinking, and to use this to help them make decisions about the writer's point of view. They should then look for details in the text to support or reject the choices they have made.
Cause is what makes something happen, whereas effect is what happens as a result of the cause. Passages in this section help readers develop the skill of identifying what happens (effect) and why it happens (cause), as well as how they are connected.
Reading critically means that the readers do not automatically accept everything they read as true, reliable or reasonable. Some facts may be left out or expressed in a particular way to suit the author's view. Opinions may be biased or illogical. Sometimes opinions may be expressed in a way that makes them sound more like facts. Also, words may be used to bias the reader towards thinking about the topic in the same way as the writer. To read critically, readers need to think about why the writer wrote the text (purpose), who they were writing to (audience), and how they feel about the topic (attitude).
eading is the foundation for all education. Practicing and exposing a child to a variety of reading opportunities is key to developing a successful reader. But simply being able to read lines of texts doesn't necessarily translate to understanding. E-School's Reading course supports the development of reading comprehension skills with age-appropriate and interesting articles/stories. 