Prediction

Once students learn about story structure, teach them to look for the foreshadowing clues. Many children enjoy predicting what is going to come next in a story. It’s fun and encourages them to read on. This gives purpose to the reading and allows students to comprehend the story at a deeper level.

To introduce students to prediction strategies have them read the beginning of a text. Then have each student predict what is going to happen next and write these predictions on the board. As the students read the remainder of the story they will gain more knowledge about the events and will have to modify their predictions.

With practice, students will become better at predicting and should be able to explain when their predictions either came true or needed to be revised. This is an excellent indicator of their reading comprehension. When students are able to comprehend a text at this level they will fully enjoy the story.