Supporting Beginning Readers in Reading to Learn: A Comprehension Strategy

Abstract

This teaching tip outlines a comprehension strategy designed to support early primary students in reading to learn while learning to read. The strategy is born of the authors’ classroom practices and is designed to support young children in reading and understanding informational texts by facilitating close interactions between text and reader. Through its steps—Read, Stop, Think, Ask, Connect—the strategy supports beginning readers in recognizing and responding to the challenges that informational texts hold for reading and comprehending. The Read, Stop, Think, Ask, Connect strategy is designed to be used flexibly to account for the diversity of readers and of texts in early primary classrooms and encourages educators to consider students’ prior learning, text selection, and multimodal supports when connecting beginning readers with informational texts.