The concept of turning print on pages into images in the mind is new to many third-grade readers. Students at this age are, however, often very familiar with viewing movies and following visual story lines. Tell your third-grade readers to use the words to play a movie in their minds. As they are reading the text, they should add the details read to the movie screens in their minds. By turning the text into a "mind movie," third-grade readers will be better prepared to comprehend the text using a familiar concept.
Before reading a new story, activate the prior knowledge of your students. A new, unfamiliar story can be difficult to understand if the reader does not know what to expect. Prepare your new readers by discussing what they may already know or have experienced about this particular topic. For many young readers, preparing their minds with a setting or character image provides the "hooks" needed to create new meaning from the text they read.
Young readers often get confused by stories that include inferences in the text. A good reader is able to "read between the lines" to extract meaning from the text. Discuss examples from the story where the author leaves it to the reader to put together the clues to understand the meaning as opposed to explicitly explaining the subject matter. The more exposure and practice readers get at making inferences, the better prepared they will be to comprehend the text independently.
Making personal connections with the meaning of the text is a trait of a good reader. When students learn to develop empathy for a character or hold an understanding for the character's actions because of similar events in their own lives, reading comprehension improves dramatically. Familiarize your young readers with the three kinds of connections with text: text-to-self, in which they connect the text with something that has happened in their own lives, text-to-text, in which they connect the text with something else they have read and comprehended and text-to-world, in which they connect the text with something that has happened in the world. (See Reference 4.)