How to teach primary school children

Monitor the adequacy of their understanding and repair faulty comprehension

Pressley (1976) and Keene and Zimmerman (1997) added sensory imaging to this list of comprehension strategies.”
I believe that it’s our responsibility to empower children to become “active, thoughtful readers” by teaching them these strategies. And I don’t think we should wait until they can decode fluently in order to teach these skills! We can lay the foundation in Kindergarten and first grade by modeling and guiding them in using these strategies with the texts we read aloud (and the texts they read independently, as much as possible).
Of course, teaching a 5 year old to infer and synthesize is no small task. For ideas about how to teach each of these strategies in a “primary-friendly” way, keep reading!

Making Connections
When we’re talking about making connections, I don’t mean comments like, “The character’s sweater is red, and MY shirt is red, too!” 😉
But of course, you are naturally going to get those types of connections from 5, 6, and 7 year olds. When I teach my kiddos how to make connections, I allow those comments for a day or two. But then I really begin to challenge them to ask themselves, “So what?” I require that when they make a connection to a text, they must also explain how the connection helped them better understand the text.
I begin by teaching students what schema is, so that they can make text-to-self connections and use background knowledge. We start with fiction, and I read them Julius, The Baby of the World, by Kevin Henkes. (This is a great book because most students can relate to feeling jealous at some point in their lives.) We talk about how our own experiences and emotions inform our understanding of characters’ emotions – we can understand why a character feels jealous because we, too, have felt jealous before. Then, I teach students how our schema can help us understand characters’ actions (our own experiences can help us figure out why a character acted a certain way).
When we move on to nonfiction, we practice considering our background knowledge before (and during) our reading of a text. I always make sure to teach students to revise their background knowledge, since not all prior knowledge is accurate. I love using the RAN strategy instead of a K-W-L, because it has a category for “We Don’t Think This Anymore.”
For detailed lesson plans on how I teach K-1 students to make connections, check out my schema unit and my text-to-text connections unit.