Reading Comprehension Strategy Sitemap

Preface - Can parents change, or are they saddled with their present attitudes and habits? Does understanding of a child and his problems of growing up make any real difference in what parents actually do, or in how the child matures? Many people today take a negative, defeatist attitude toward those questions.

However, there is a positive way of thinking about child growth and development.

01. Parents' - Parents are naturally concerned about their child's reading. Reading is associated with social prestige; it affects social relations. Our principal means of communicating with one another are reading, speaking, listening, and writing. Inability to use these tools may seriously interfere with a person's social adjustment.

02. Child's View - One reason why Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer are classics is that Mark Twain got inside his characters, and thought and felt as they did. To understand children and adolescents we, too, need to see things from their point of view rather than from ours. We need to view their world through their eyes.

Do we really know what reading means to a child? Have we any idea of the eagerness with which a six-year-old goes to school to learn to read?

03. What Is Reading - Four-year-old David, holding the newspaper upside down, looked at it intently as he had seen his father do. "I'm reading," he said.

His twin sister picked up her mother's grocery list and rattled off a number of items that bore no resemblance to those on the list. Both children were merely imitating their parents, whom they had seen reading in these ways, for different purposes.

04. Preschool - Preschool experiences pave the way for successful reading in school. From early infancy the child is building attitudes toward himself and his world. First of all, he is learning to look. Out of a vague blur of light and darkness, certain objects take on meaning—perhaps the first of these is his mother's face. Practice in seeing objects is prerequisite to later perception of printed words.

05. Primary Grades - Just as the preschool years are a prelude to a successful beginning in reading, so success in the primary grades builds a firm foundation for effective reading in years to come.

Starting with a desire to read and the ability to differentiate objects by observing their distinctive details, the child learns to recognize a number of words at sight.

06. Horizons - By the end of the third grade, children should have acquired sufficient basic reading skills to be reading widely and independently. But reading difficulties often begin to show up during the fourth grade. Children who have not acquired a real interest in reading, a desire to learn from books, a basic sight vocabulary, word-recognition skills, or techniques of reading for meaning, find themselves all at sea in the new subjects.

07. Adolescence - An adolescent boy made this comment: "Parents pay a lot of attention to their children during the early years, but neglect them more and more as they grow up." This tendency is due partly to the adolescent's apparent rejection of parental authority and supervision and partly to the parent's feeling of inadequacy to guide an adolescent's learning.

Appendix - Books

Artley, A. Sterl. Your Child Learns To Read. Chicago: Scott, Foresman & Company, 1953. 255 pp. An authoritative book explaining the reading process and how it is taught.

Bond, Guy L., and Eva Bond Wagner. Child Growth in Reading. Chicago: Lyons & Carnahan, 1955. 431 pp. A simple description of how reading is taught, with illustrations of pages from basal readers.

References - Witty, Paul. "Public Is Misled on Meaning of Reading," The Nations Schools, Vol. 56: (July 1955), pp. 35-40.

Espy, Herbert G. "What Specialists Tell Us About Improving the Teaching of the Three R's," The Nation's Schools, Vol. 54: (November 1954), pp. 52-55.

Conant, James Bryant. Recommendations for Education in the Junior

High School Years, p. 21. Educational Testing Service, 20 Nassau Street, Princeton, New Jersey, I960.

Witty, Paul. Helping Children Read Better. Chicago: Science Research Associates, 1950.

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