As teachers and educational therapists may know, many special education students often have difficulty learning reading comprehension skills and word definitions. The good news is that there are numerous in-person and online learning resources beyond worksheets and books to improve children’s listening and reading comprehension.
Interactive activities provide children who are learning to read with the opportunity to practice and reinforce their comprehension skills in various ways. Many games, such as word search puzzles and other kid-approved favorites, can be tailored to a specific grade level and are simple enough for even young children to play.
Our special education experts have scoured the web to select a few of our favorite comprehension activities, which educational therapists and teachers can easily incorporate into any special education classroom.
With the help of these exciting four comprehensive activities, students can build confidence in their critical reading skills, learn how to respond to a passage effectively, and repurpose an activity they have participated in previously. Without further ado, here they are!
- Journal Responses
After reading a passage, students can write an individualized reader-response journal entry in response to various reader-response prompts. For example, students may be asked to retell the story in their own words, identify major characters, describe the plot, asks questions, make inferences, and utilize other key comprehension strategies. The journal response below was written about the book Pete the Cat: Big Easter Adventure.
- Sequencing Activities
Another way that students can respond to a text is by sequencing the order of events through words, sentences, and pictures. Below is an example of a useful comprehension activity that asks children to read a short passage and recap the story’s events by numbering the steps chronologically.
- “Read and Do”
Another fun and interactive activity is “Read and Do,” which helps children, especially kinesthetic learners, practice their comprehension skills. Students read or listen to a passage and then act based on what they read. For example, in the example below, a child firsts read the sentence on each index card and then practices what it says, such as “count to ten,” “stomp your feet,” or “say hi to Miss Pam.”
- Meaning Matching
Because students are often confused by “multiple meaning words,” which include homophones, homonyms, and homographs, they can benefit from direct instruction on these tricky words. For example, students can use puzzles and pictures to match a word to multiple meanings, such as “bark.” After reading a sentence or short passage, students can indicate which picture illustrates the correct definition.
To conclude, these four exceptional comprehensive activities will equip special education students to respond compellingly to texts, expand their critical thinking skills, and reuse activities that they have previously completed.
Specifically, students will learn essential skills, such as responding to texts by utilizing key comprehension strategies like making inferences, sequencing the order of events, identifying “multiple meaning words,” and more.
As students transition from learning how to read to reading to learn, we encourage swapping out mundane worksheets and routine comprehension exercises for these four educator-approved activities–and allow children to practice their comprehension skills in an individualized, exciting, exciting, and even fun way.
Educators, which comprehension activities have you used in your special education classroom? Please share in the comments below!
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