Oxton House Publishers, LLC

Reading Comprehension

Are your students decoding words and phrases accurately but having trouble understanding what they read?
Do they miss the point of a story or get the characters confused?
Are you looking for strategies to help them become more effective, more willing readers?

Here’s what you need:

Teaching Comprehension:

Strategies for Stories

Phyllis E. Fischer, Ph.D.

ISBN 1-881929-27-2, 64 pages, 8.5"x11", $24.95

Contents

1. First Thoughts

2. Characters and Settings

3. Facts vs. Inferences

4. Summarizing

5. Plot, Problem, Solution, and Climax

6. Rising and Falling Action

7. Characters Developed over Several Stories

8. Tried and True Tactics

9. Planning and Charting

These comprehension strategies can be used to help your students understand any narrative text, from short stories to chapter books to long novels. The particular story examples in this manual have been drawn from a single, easily obtainable source: Kimberly Ramsey’s Stories from Somerville, Books 1 and 2, a pair of readers written in phonetically controlled text. These stories provide a rich source of examples for students who are learning to decode via a structured phonics approach. However:

you can easily adapt these techniques and suggestions to any other short stories, novels, biographical sketches, or
any other reading materials that have story lines.

As students work with these strategies, they use “story line pages” to organize their depictions of the parts of the stories. Each story line page has places for characters, settings, and plot. Blackline masters for these pages are provided with this book, one letter size and one legal size. Here is an example of a completed story line page.

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