Parents or Adults Helping in Your Classroom

Do you have adults coming into your classroom wanting to help or parents wanting to know what they can do at home? Here is a handout you can print and have on hand for them to work on comprehension. Remember comprehension is a transfer skill. Children have to develop the ability to recall and retell life events first. Only then are we able to transfer the skill of recall and retell to reading.

Working on Comprehension

Below is a chart to be used as a guide for adults working with students on understanding what they read.

Activities	Reasoning Why
Building Relationships: Be a good listener Don’t judge /Don’t fact-find If something comes up that is a concern, tell the teacher or supervisor that they need to ask the student about what happened. Let the teacher of supervisor investigate.	Students/Children need the nurturing that can come from an adult, take the time to get to know them. If something comes up we want you to keep your relationship and trust. Your job is just to let the person in charge know there might be a concern they need to address.
Have the students tell you a story. Ask Questions to clarify their story.	Having the students tell you a story helps them with building their comprehension. It makes them sequence.
Have the students tell you a story using pictures from a book. You may use a book that just has cool pictures and you don't read the story to the child. Ask Questions to clarify their story.	The end goal is for the students to be able to write a story about an event. They often need more practice telling about an event or story before writing. Writing is a higher skill than telling.
Read to the children. As you read ask them questions about what they think will happen. Ask them to retell the story to you. Have them use the picture of the story to retell.	Modeling reading is always great. As adult readers we intuitively ask questions. Children need to learn this skill. By you stopping and asking them those questions they will learn to transfer questioning to their own reading. Having them retell the story builds their own comprehension skills.
Have the students read to you. When the student comes to a word they don’t know, just say the word for them. Have them tell about what they read.	Having students read to someone is always beneficial. Just telling the student any unknown words allows the flow of the reading to continue and doesn’t take the child’s focus off of remembering what they read.

Dr. Scott’s Creative Teaching