As we discussed in Part 1, the goal of teaching comprehension is to ensure that the reader retains the important elements of the content.

Here is another method we use with our 7 year old -

• Read 2-3 pages of a book.

• Ask him to explain what he read by acting it out. He can only say names and places - he has to act out everything else.

• For example, we were reading a Harry Potter book and there was a bit about Mr. Dursley who was a beefy man with a big moustache.

• He could say the name Mr. Dursley but he had to act out his personality.

• This makes the reading activity fun as the reader is looking forward to acting the content out and also he pays more attention while reading so that he knows what to act out.

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• Don’t rush it - you can teach it in 1 hour but you do want the kids to enjoy it and be confident doing it, don’t you?

• We first ask him to memorize multiplication tables from 1 to 10.

• This task is plain memorization. Do 1-5 on day 1 - repeat to a parent on day 2.

• Spend day 2 just repeating and perfecting. 1-5.

• Add fun things like putting a timer on, keeping a small prize if he/she does it correctly and so on. Our boy loves timers.

• Do 6-10 on day 3. Repeat and perfect on day 3, 4 and 5.

• Spend day 6 repeating and perfecting 1 to 10.

• Now he can tell the table from 1 through 10 but he can only do it sequentially. He still can’t tell you something like what 7x8 are.

• Day 7, 8, 9 are for written excercises. We ask him to complete 50 1-digit multiplications in one sitting.

• I fill in a notebook with questions like 5x9, 8x8, 9x7 etc. It took him about 20 minutes on first try. He still arrived at the answers by going through the multiplication table sequentially.

• However, if we repeat this task multiple times, he starts recalling and doesn’t need to do the sequential thing.

• For perfection, we keep score every time we do it and I also put a bonus question like 11x6 that he gets more points for.

• His daily score is improving and now he can do 1-digit multiplications in his head.

• Day 10 is when I teach multiplication for 2 or more digits.

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Goal:

Ensure that what is read is understood and enough portions are remembered so that the reader can build a summary from those portions.

This is how we do it with our 7 year old 2nd grader.

• Every evening, we spend 30 minutes reading one book.

• Right now we read 2-3 pages at a maximum.

• Our current book is from a set of Sherlock Holmes series from Costco.

• At the end of reading, I ask him to recall and summarize everything he read.

• He does not recall everything at first, so we read all of it again.

• This time he ensures that he reads slowly and tries to focus only on the reading material.

• By doing this, I am emphasizing on paying full attention and remembering as many things as he reads.

Future:

• Eventually we’ll start reading much more than 2-3 pages in one sitting and increase his mental focus to retain more information.

• As brain typically works, in stead of memorizing everything he reads, he’ll learn to keep only the important portions so that he can rebuild the whole content from those.

Read improving-comprehension-part-2.

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In case you are in a similar situation, or even if you do not care about this whole giftedness thing and just want to keep your curious kids inspired with activities that are fun but still stimulate their little brains, this blog is for you.

So this is what we plan to do. Every now and then we’ll provide a concise list of things kids can do at home. Note the word “concise” - we are serious about that. We know that as parents of little kids most of us already have our hands full and none of us have time to read a New York Times article every day.

So, here I finish what could be the longest post that we ever write.

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