Learning to figure out the meaning of unfamiliar words and phrases from the surrounding context marks an important milestone in the quest to become an independent reader. To give children practice recognizing meaning, split the class into teams. Read a story or passage aloud that has several words that the children have not experienced before but whose meaning is clear through attention to surrounding details. Stop and ask the meaning of these words and phrases. Let the teams take turns or have teams buzz in, as in a game show. The answering team must define the words and explain the context clues that hint at the meaning. If the answer is not correct, the other team gets a chance to answer and collect the point.
Personal experience and textual clues are key in helping children recognize cause-and-effect and foreshadowing in stories in order to make predictions. Choose stories with clear cause-and-effect relationships or suspense for read-alouds. Stop at key points and ask children to predict what will happen next. Make a set of cause-and-effect matching cards and let the children play a game of memory concentration with them.
Even if the text is describing something unfamiliar or completely imaginary with which the children have no personal experience, a careful reading the description helps them visualize what it might look like. Give each child a short, written description of a nonsense creature and ask her to draw a picture of it to match the characteristics described. Hang the pictures around the room and collect the descriptions. Mix them up and pass them out at random. Each child should read the description and try to match it to the correct picture. Continue trading descriptions and matching pictures as time allows.
Recognizing the underlying structure of the text helps children better understand what the author is trying to say. Some passages are sequential or descriptive or instructive, while others describe cause-and-effect, problems and solutions or compare and contrast two ideas or objects. Make a habit of identifying text structures during read-alouds, pointing out, for instance, time order or directional words or noting that instructions on how to do something start with imperative verbs. When children are familiar with the characteristics that mark various text structures, challenge them to notice these parts of a story during a read-aloud, with a physical response such as clapping or jumping up when they hear a problem and solution or notice a comparison.
Differentiating fact from opinion prepares a child to recognize bias and identify reliable sources of information as he moves from learning to read to reading to learn. Ask students to write several statements on 3-by-5-inch cards, some facts and some opinions. Put students in groups of two to four and combine their cards for a playing deck. Make a matching card for each one that simply reads, "Fact" or "Opinion." Shuffle them and put them in a separate stack. Students should take turns flipping over one card from each deck and reading the statement. They then should state whether the statement is fact or opinion and why. If a student is correct and it matches the second card, then she keeps the pair. Otherwise, both cards are returned to the bottom of their respective piles. Continue play as time allows or until all of the cards are matched. The person with the most matches wins.