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Reading Comprehension

Reading Comprehension

Comprehension with Ease® helps students who

  • Don’t remember or understand what they’ve read
  • Have difficulty keeping track of details and sequence
  • Struggle with getting the main idea and making predictions and inferences

 

 
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Our toolkit includes:  Reading with Ease, Expression with Ease, Visualizing and Verbalizing, Graphic Organizers, Effective Note-taking strategies, Critical Thinking Company

Comprehension with Ease strengthens the ability to

  • recognize when you haven’t understood what you read
  • create images or mental movies from text
  • build background knowledge
  • interact with text
  • answer word problems and short answer or multiple choice questions

How do I know if my child has issues with reading comprehension?

For many students the act of reading is about getting from the first page to the last page as fast as they can. They hate to read even though it’s easy for them. The idea of enjoying what they read or slowing down makes no sense to them. Often times, they don’t realize they have an issue with comprehension because they’ve never had an experience of deep understanding to compare their surface knowledge to. Students with comprehension issues are often great imitators, test takers and develop many strategies to mask their lack of understanding. Often times, students will be able to successfully navigate the school system and appear to be doing well until that one year when their strategies are no longer enough and suddenly they are failing.

Learn to recognize and experience understanding

Most readers have a trigger that lets them know they didn’t understand what they read. They go back to reread and clarify. For many students, that trigger just isn’t there because they’ve never understood what they are reading. We develop the ability to first experience understanding and then instill the habit of stopping, rereading and thinking when something doesn’t make sense.  This processes directly impacts a student’s ability to gain vocabulary as they are reading.

Create images or mental movies from text

Students practice creating and explaining images made in their mind. They work on paragraph level passages to see if they can retell the passage, give a main idea and answer questions. This skill is practiced until it becomes automatic and becomes a strategy that is used to help clarify confusion. The ability to create mental images is at the heart of comprehension. Without it, other comprehension strategies aren’t effective.

The Comprehension with Ease® Program

The Reading Clinic has worked with many students whose weaknesses in comprehension and/or expressive language have kept them from reaching their potential. This ability to conceptualize language, or sensory cognitive processing, is key not only to reading, but also oral and written expression, developing a sense of humor, and following directions. It is an ability that becomes critical for a student’s success in middle and high school.

The Reading Clinic uses the Comprehension with Ease® program to teach students how to both draw meaning from text and to verbally express their understanding of it. This highly effective program provides students with the ability to conceptualize mental images that match content, and use language to describe those images. Starting at a concrete level and moving towards more abstract concepts, we help students to visualize the content of what they are reading. This method is highly successful in improving reading comprehension and memory retention.

Parents and teachers often notice increased self-esteem in these students who were previously struggling. They also notice an eagerness in these students to join in group discussions. Furthermore, they are actually engaged in learning; reading for them is now intriguing and stimulating and no longer involves constant rereading of text in order to grasp the meaning of it.