Reading Comprehension: Meghan

While I read I have noticed that I often predict what I think will happen in the text. Gibson explains that a good "during reading" strategy is the "pause and predict" method where the teacher stops as she is reading and asks the students questions such as, "What do you think is going to happen?" I often read books straight through because I get too caught up in what I think will happen so I force myself to finish the book right away. I also have noticed that when I go to the library or book store I often pick out the book with an intriguing title and guess what the book is about based off of its title. Gibson calls this, "predicting from Title or First Sentence" where the teacher writes the tile of the book or the first sentence on the board and the children predict what it will be about. Something I never really thought about until I read the Gibson chapter was the fact that I use surrounding words and text to predict the meaning of a word that I do not know. Gibson explains that this strategy is much more useful for students because getting a dictionary to look up every word they do not know disrupts their reading and sometimes gives the wrong definition for the word in that particular context. 

In the field I have noticed that many children predict what will happen in the reading based on pictures or the title of the book. They also rely on background knowledge and pictures to help with unfamiliar words. For example, one student was reading me a story about otters and as she read she learned that otters eat kelp. She looked at me funny when she got that word and said, "What is kelp? I thought otters ate seaweed, that is what the person at the zoo told me. Maybe kelp is seaweed." I asked her to keep reading expecting the book to explain to her what kelp was, but instead they showed her a picture and she realized that kelp and seaweed were actually the same thing. I was amazed that the student was able to use her knowledge of otters outside the classroom along with pictures to help her figure out the meaning of the word. This is a great strategy to use, and I'm glad my student was able to realize that she could figure out the meaning of the word on her own without any help.