Build a Reading Comprehension Activity in Five Minutes

Most comprehension questions test whether a child can find a sentence again. Four question types, one of each, tell you far more, and generating them takes about as long as making tea.

How it goes

1. Use something they have already read. A chapter, a page from a non-fiction book, a passage you made earlier.
2. Ask for one question of each type with the prompt below. Four questions is the right number for a nine-year-old.
3. Answer them yourself from the text. Any question you cannot answer from the passage gets binned.
4. Give them out loud, not on paper, for a child who resists writing.
5. Accept short answers for the first three and push only on the last one.
6. Ask your child to write one question for you. Their question tells you what they thought the passage was about.

The prompt

Here is a passage my 9-year-old just read: [paste]. Write four questions: one where the answer is stated directly, one that needs two parts of the text joined together, one about why a character or writer did something, and one asking her opinion with reasons. Give me the answers to the first three from the text only.

What a good result looks like

The four should be visibly different in what they demand. Retrieval: Where did she hide the key? Inference across two places: How do we know she had been there before? Author intent: Why does the writer tell us about the rain? Opinion with reasons: Should she have told her brother?

Answer the first three yourself from the passage alone. If you cannot find the evidence, the question is about a passage the model imagined rather than the one you pasted.

Check it before you use it

• Answerable from the passage? Models write plausible questions about things the text never mentions. Answer each yourself first.
• Are the four types actually different? Sometimes you get four retrieval questions with different wording.
• Level. A question can be harder to read than the passage it is about.

Keep the human part

Question four has no right answer, and your response to it matters more than all the others. “What made you think that?” is the whole subject in five words.

If it is not working

If your child answers everything with a shrug, ask the opinion question first rather than last. Opening with the one that has no wrong answer changes the whole tone, and the retrieval questions get answered more willingly afterwards.

If they can retrieve but not infer, that is the finding, and more retrieval practice will not fix it. Model the inference out loud on the next passage: here is what it says, here is what it does not say, here is what I think and why.

One thing to watch

Comprehension worksheets are the format most likely to turn a keen reader off. Four questions asked over a snack is a different experience from a printed sheet, and the learning is the same.

Related: discussion questions that go beyond what happened covers question four in depth, and the read, talk, make activity is the version with no questions at all.