Reading Comprehension Posters: What, Where, and Why


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Andie Cunningham

Several years ago, I started creating permanent posters to use in my comprehension strategy work. My hope for the large posters was two-pronged. I wanted the posters to serve as a visual reference, a way for us to all narrow our focus over and over again when we turned to strategy work. The second hope was to show the children (and classroom visitors) how important the strategies were to all of our classwork. By creating and then displaying each poster for several weeks on our bulletin board, and then hanging the poster from the ceiling for the rest of the school year, I hoped to deepen our work as learners and as a community.

Sharing the decorating of the walls, windows and doors with students is a commitment I make before the children enter the room in the fall. I work hard to limit how much space I take up with calendar, schedule, and other daily ritual necessities. The rest of the room is filled with the work of the children in as many places as I can find without overpowering the space and taking away the most important people in the room: the students. Keeping that in mind as I made (or asked more artistic adult helpers to make) the posters, I decided on the size, color, shape and wording of the posters.

I consistently had Spanish speakers in my classroom. Since I frequently speak that language in our classroom, I decided to include a translation of the strategy explanation in Spanish on most posters as well.

Waiting for the Moment to Introduce the First Poster

At the beginning of every year, I store all seven of the posters beside my desk and out of view of the children. I place the metacognition poster in a place where I can find it first when the moment arises. That moment is an important one. It often happens during our third or fourth week of being together.

Before I read a book aloud to the children, I invite them to notice what is confusing for them. I start listening for the moment someone says, "Andie, I don't understand that word," or "Andie, I don't understand that picture" as I read a book aloud. That is the perfect opening and the one I have been looking for. I leap up, scamper to the hidden poster, pull it out and say, "You are brilliant. You have just used your amazing brain to show us metacognition. This big word means thinking about your thinking, and that means that when you know something doesn't make sense to you, you are thinking about your thinking. You just did that- you just used metacognition!"

The metacognition poster is pulled out and discussed with students in that magic moment when a child first questions their understanding of a text.

With a giant grin on my face, I dramatically pin the poster onto our bulletin board right in the view of all in the circle. This is the beginning of our comprehension work together. When one child takes the enormous risk to speak of his or her misunderstanding, we have started on a path that will lead and inform us for the rest of the year.

Understanding Inferring

Much later in the year, we enter into the world of inferring. Inferring, creating a new meaning from your schema and the book you are reading, is tricky. To me, it seems to be a strategy that children enter into by surprise. It is almost like I am simply giving them a label for the understanding and inferences they are making in the books we are reading. We are ready to study inferring after we have studied metacognition, schema, mind pictures, determining importance, and asking questions.

At this point in the year, often in April, I simply change the posters while the children are away, placing whatever we just finished studying up on the ceiling with the other comprehension posters and pinning the new inferring poster up on the wall of our bulletin board. On the first day of our week together, which is also the first day of inferring, I carefully and briefly explain this new strategy. I usually have the exact opening that I want to say written down on my lesson plan so I can say what I want to say without wasting the children's time or focus. I intentionally offer them a metaphorical hand into the world of inferring, since I want their experience to follow smoothly and successfully with our other comprehension work.

The inferring poster helps children visualizes the mental bridges they make between what they know and what is in the book.

After explaining what inferences are, I read our book for the first time and I model my own inferring from the book. Typically, I have some sort of placeholder ready to record my inferences on, like sticky notes for the anchor chart we will make in the coming days. A theme I return to verbally and frequently is "bridge", of our taking what we know of our schema and what we know of the book, and by putting those two pieces together, we gain new understanding.

Introducing Synthesis

The last strategy we study each year is synthesis. I intentionally hold synthesis for late in the school year since I find it so difficult. In years past, I would reserve three weeks for the study of synthesis, but this past year, I was able carve out four, and the extra week allowed us to explore more leisurely and more deeply what our synthesis was in the books we read. To me, synthesis is like the finale, the grand last piece of work that really shows what you know, and when the children are able to synthesize their understandings from the books we read, the miracles of their thinking are obvious. The synthesis poster I designed is intended to help the children consciously view the book we are reading from two different places: their own lens of seeing life and the lens of something or someone in the book. To us, synthesis is living in two places at once while also finding ways to communicate that understanding to others.

The synthesis poster encourages students to put their "lens on" when viewing the book through the eyes of their world.

At the beginning of our synthesis work, I introduce synthesis much like I did inferring, with the intentional framing and explanation followed by a read-aloud and modeling. The poster I created offers us an idea of how to narrow our views into specifics of the book: we can move our hands like binoculars over our eyes and start to see our new understandings from a new place of reference. From here our work continues like with the other strategies, with us creating anchor charts, moving to our new understanding, and finding different ways to communicate what we know.

The synthesis poster remains on display during read-alouds, anchor chart construction, and all our reading work together.

The posters in the classroom serve us well. What a trip we have taken from the beginning of the year and those often one- sided conversations about metacognition. What were confused faces then in October and November have become the faces of children who find ways to show and speak of the ways they make sense of the books we read in our classroom community.

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This essay is an excerpt from the DVD workshop package Synthesizing Butterflies: Teaching Reading Strategies to Kindergartners. For more information and to preview a free sample of the video, click here.