Teachers provide vocabulary words when teaching new material. Students learn the definitions and spelling of the words. Learning synonyms, words with similar meanings, and antonyms, words with opposite meanings, increases vocabulary by learning the relationship between words. Distinguishing between homonyms, words that sound alike but mean different things, also improves comprehension. For example, their, there and they're all sound alike but have very different meanings. Using a dictionary and a thesaurus to look up new words will provide meanings and word grouping. Learning common prefixes (word beginnings) and suffixes (word endings), such as "anti-" and "pre-" or "--ology" and "--able", helps students to more effectively dissect the meanings of words and build vocabulary.
Instructors teach elementary students to dissect paragraphs and articles to find main ideas and the writer's purpose. Teachers demonstrate the skill on the board and then have students underline the main idea or diagram the paragraph. Alternate ideas include choosing a main idea and writing around it or taking sentences the support a main idea and writing a sentence to begin the paragraph that explains the main idea. Students must also define the purpose from the main idea, such as informative, illustrative or persuasive.
Inferring looks at the details presented in the material and makes assumptions about the situation, such as season, location or the character's motivation. Predicting uses the same information to predict what will happen next. These details can also reveal cause and effect, such as an angry character who murders a rival when the rival steals his invention. Teachers can illustrate how to use context clues in an elementary class and then assign similar activities for group or independent work. Students can use context to predict the outcome or take the outcome and write different scenarios about how the character arrived at a particular situation or location.
Well-written stories and articles have a definite beginning, middle and end, just as a paragraph does. Teachers in first through third grades work to teach students how to sequence by placing the different story events on cards or in an illustration and have students put the events in the correct order. With older students, a science teacher might have students put the steps of an experiment in proper order or order the outcome.