Comprehension Strategies
The Making Meaning program explicitly teaches comprehension strategies—introducing them in the grades where they are developmentally appropriate.
Retelling
What it is
Good readers use retelling to identify and remember important ideas or sequences of events that they need to know or recall.
How it’s used in the program
Students in Grades K–2 retell stories using setting, character, and plot to organize their thinking.
Using Schema/Making Connections
What it is
Good readers construct meaning by connecting their prior knowledge to information in the text.
How it’s used in the program
Students activate relevant prior knowledge before, during, and after reading.
Visualizing
What it is
Good readers form visual and other sensory images during reading to better understand, remember, and enjoy texts.
How it’s used in the program
Students visualize to make sense of figurative language and deepen their understanding of poems and stories.
Wondering/Questioning
What it is
Good readers ask questions about a text to focus their reading, clarify meaning, and delve deeper into the text.
How it’s used in the program
Students generate questions before, during, and after reading to make sense of text, and they analyze their questions to deepen their understanding of the reading.
Making Inferences
What it is
Good readers use prior knowledge and information in a text to create meanings not explicitly stated, moving from the literal to a deeper understanding of texts.
How it’s used in the program
Students make inferences to think more deeply about both narrative and expository texts.
Determining Important Ideas
What it is
Determining the important ideas in texts helps readers identify information that is essential to know and remember.
How it’s used in the program
Students identify information that is essential to know and remember.
Understanding Text Structure
What it is
Good readers use their knowledge of narrative and expository text structure to improve their comprehension.
How it’s used in the program
Students use story elements (e.g., setting, characters, plot) to help them understand stories, and identify and use features (e.g., headings, subheadings) and relationships (cause and effect, compare and contrast) to help them comprehend expository texts.
Summarizing
What it is
Good readers identify and bring together the essential ideas of a text as a way of understanding what they have read and communicating it to others.
How it’s used in the program
Students identify important ideas in a text and use them to develop oral and written summaries.
Synthesizing
What it is
Synthesizing is a complex process that requires readers to visualize, use schema, question, infer, and summarize to develop new ideas and understandings based on information in a text.
How it’s used in the program
Students in grades 4–8 synthesize to form opinions and make judgments about texts.
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