Comprehension and the Fabulous Four

If you are a teacher, you are familiar with the term "reciprocal teaching", which is a fabulous comprehension strategy for the students. Speaking of fabulous, the kids refer to them as "The Fabulous Four". 

Whenever the student is assigned to be the leader of their reading group that day, they know to facilitate and to keep everyone on track. They begin by giving their friends a few seconds to look at the cover of their book, and flip through the pages to look at headings and illustrations. Then the leader asks each person for their predictions about the content of the book. 

As they take turns reading the story, they try to see who had the correct predictions and who didn't...this allows them to be completely engaged, thus helping them to comprehend.

The second item in "The Fabulous Four" is asking questions. The leader asks each person in the group to come up with an excellent question, and the others answer. The more practice they have doing this, the more complex their questions become, thus helping them to think critically.

The third thing is called "clarifying", which means exactly that. This allows each person to freely ask others the parts of the story that confused them, or phrases/vocabulary words they did not understand. Others are more than willing to share their wealth of knowledge to clarify the content.

Finally, they summarize the story. This is a difficult skill to master, but oh SO helpful. A common way to help them summarize the main points are the who, what, when, where, and why. However, my favorite is the "Somebody-Wanted-But-So" strategy! For example, "Cinderella-wanted to go to the ball-but the wicked stepmother and sisters would not allow her to- so the fairy godmother gave her everything she needed, allowing her to go and meet the prince to live happily ever after."

Summarizing becomes even more challenging when they are told to use only 10 words or less. This is helpful for those kids who are too verbose in their explanations of unnecessary details :) 

Not only do we use helpful strategies like the Fabulous Four, we also have excellent comprehension questions that we answer every week regarding our anchor text (story of the week). 

They are not allowed to simply answer the questions. They are required to show their partner "textual evidence" for their answer (we just say "text evidence" for short). 

The kids are actually harder on each other than I am. They don't let anyone get away with a thought-less answer :) 

This is just a bonus photo of the cute little birds that come to visit our classroom window from time to time.

Because it's a mirrored window, we can see them, but the birds can't see us. It's a great way to observe the little guys!

I am extremely proud of our 16 kids in our class! They have taken the comprehension strategies to heart. NO WONDER they are improving so much on their Lexile scores!!