Expanding children's vocabulary can improve their reading comprehension. Often children will read a word but not ask for its definition or look it up if they do not know its meaning. The inability to understand a critical word can make it difficult for the child to comprehend the meaning of the sentence. Teaching children synonyms, and encouraging them to use context clues and the dictionary, will improve their comprehension.
Promote discussions about text. When children talk about what they read, they are engaged more interactively in their reading and attentive to details. Ask children about the main idea of a story and questions about what happened. For example, ask why they think a character reacted a certain way, or how the character's actions affected someone else in the story.
Worksheets that highlight and reinforce vocabulary in the story can help children improve their comprehension. Additionally, worksheets containing questions about the story encourage attentive reading. Children may even preview the worksheets before they read so they can focus on obtaining the requested information.
Summarizing requires students to identify the main points of the text and express them in their own words. Teach students how to summarize by modeling a good summary. According to Reading Quest, a website providing content reading and comprehension strategies information for social studies teachers, summaries should answer the questions of "who," "what," "when," "where" and "how" succinctly so the reader can quickly identify the essence of the story.