In an interactive read-aloud activity, the teacher purposefully reads aloud to expose the students to the various genres of work. This helps the students to comprehend the difference between the stories and factual texts. It also serves the purpose of reading-intervention strategy, as reading aloud is a creative activity in which the students are taught to visualize the text and predict the inference based on background knowledge; T-charts and sticky notes made through the reading can help the second graders conceptualize, while mapping the clues to draw conclusions.
Worksheets that reinforce the basic concepts of reading comprehension in second graders include articles, passages and poems; stories based on fiction, non-fiction and science facts, followed by comprehension questions and puzzles for the students to solve (see Resources section). Worksheets cover topics like synonyms and antonyms, homophones, verbs, nouns and parts of speech for vocabulary building and grammar; rhyming words, prefixes and blends for phonemic awareness; word guesses, sentence structure, comprehension questions based on theme, predictions, facts, story sequencing and summarizing for making inferences.
Graphic organizers help the children identify and sort the key concepts and ideas from the text and organize their thoughts in logical, productive ways (see Resources section). Graphic organizer models include the who, what, when, where, why, and how questions to enable understanding of the reading material. Second-grade reading-comprehension graphic organizer activities include introducing character traits; story web, where the events are sequenced for summarizing; and conflict dissection, where the student cites the context clues that support their inference and rectify mistakes. Detail-oriented graphic organizers include story mapping and reading comprehension sequence chain for identifying key elements like character, setting or significant events (see Resources section). The number-lines and place-value charts and animal-themed graphic organizers are popular among second graders (see Resources section).
Comprehension can be made fun for second graders using activity games like "Outguess the Author," in which the teacher stops in the middle of a sentence for the students to predict the next word. Second graders also form sentence structures using phrases from the puzzle bag in the sentence puzzle activity; in this activity, complete sentences are written on cut-up strips of paper to make incomplete phrases, which are then placed in a bag as puzzles for the children to work on. "Tell a Story in a Jar" is a creative variant in which a jar is filled with sentences written on paper strips, and the student picks up a strip, one after the other, reading out loud to develop the story. The teacher uses prompting questions for story development, and the student learns creative and sequencing skills to create wild stories.