The Super Six Reading Comprehension Strategies: Reading Comprehension Tools
Reading comprehension is an essential skill for students to learn. So often many students find it difficult to comprehend what has been read. As teachers we need to ensure we implement strategies to support students understanding of what they are reading so they can make meaning from a range of texts. The easiest and most effective strategies to support and scaffold student comprehension is the use of the Super Six Reading Comprehension Strategies.
The Super Six relies on six main areas of comprehension including Making Connections (Text-Self, Text-Text and Text-World), Predicting, Visualising, Questioning, Monitoring and Summarising.
Understanding the Super Six Reading Comprehension Strategies
1. Making Connections: Connecting ideas from the text to other contexts.
Text-Self: Relating something in the text to personal experience.
Text-Text: Relating something in the text that has been viewed in another text.
Text-World: Relating something in the text that is seen or occurring in the world.
2. Predicting: Using the title, picture on the front cover and blurb of a text to make a guess about the story and what might happen.
3. Visualising: Making pictures in the mind when hearing or reading a text.
4. Questioning: Asking questions about the text to collect more information about the text.
5. Monitoring: Checking for meaning and understanding of the text.
6. Summarising: Identifying the most important parts of the text. Includes the who, what, when, where and why questions.
The Super Six can be implemented from K-6 and the complexity adjusted and differentiated to suite a diverse range of student reading abilities, skill sets and ages.
The Super Six are great to use in Guided Reading Groups with one strategy taught each week. As students become more familiar ad confident with how to use them a range of these strategies could be integrated into a guided reading session. The ultimate goal is for students to independently use these strategies when completing reading tasks. To do so we as teachers need to explicitly model and demonstrate what these strategies mean and how to apply them to a range of texts.
I have found integrating the Super Six into English programs has allowed students to develop independence using the strategies as they are consistently being reinforced in a range of settings.
In my classroom I also have a Super Six display wall in the reading corner so students are constantly viewing and being reminded to use the strategies during silent reading and buddy reading.
Websites including Teach Starter, Teach This and Twinkl have great Super Six displays and resources to use in the classroom for easy student reference and teaching instruction and strategies.
