A Parent's Guide to Reading Comprehension Strategies

Help your child learn how to truly understand what they read.

If your child can read a book but struggles to explain what happened, identify what is important, or think deeply about the text, it can be hard to know how to help. Asking more comprehension questions may tell you whether your child understood, but it doesn’t necessarily teach them how to comprehend.

A Parent’s Guide to Reading Comprehension Strategies gives you practical, step-by-step guidance for teaching your child the thinking strategies strong readers use to make meaning from text.

Designed specifically with parents in mind, this comprehensive resource takes the guesswork out of supporting reading comprehension at home. You’ll learn how to explain, model, practice, and gradually encourage independent use of six essential comprehension strategies.

Six Essential Comprehension Strategies

This guide focuses on:

• Predicting — using clues and prior knowledge to think about what may happen next

• Visualizing — creating mental images to deepen understanding

• Connecting — linking the text to experiences, other texts, and knowledge of the world

• Questioning — asking meaningful questions before, during, and after reading

• Summarizing — identifying and explaining the most important ideas and events

• Making Inferences — combining text clues with background knowledge to understand what the author doesn’t directly state

More Than a Workbook—A Guide for Parents

This resource doesn’t simply give your child more comprehension worksheets to complete. It shows you how to teach the strategies.

You’ll learn how to use a simple I DO → WE DO → YOU DO approach:

I DO: Explicitly teach the strategy and model your thinking through think-alouds.

WE DO: Practice the strategy together while you provide guidance and support.

YOU DO: Gradually encourage your child to apply the strategy more independently.

Each strategy includes a dedicated Parent Strategy Guide with:

• A simple explanation of the strategy

• Why the strategy matters

• Child-friendly language for introducing it

• Think-aloud examples that show you exactly what modeling can sound like

• Guided-practice prompts

• Suggestions for encouraging independence

• Tips for helping your child use the strategy effectively

30 Printable Comprehension Activities

You’ll also receive five printable activities for each of the six strategies (30 activities in all).

Use these flexible graphic organizers with books you already have at home. Choose the activity that best fits your child, the book you’re reading, and the strategy you’re practicing. There’s no need to work through the packet from beginning to end or complete every activity.

Children can write their responses independently, respond orally, draw, or dictate their thinking to an adult, making the activities adaptable for a range of ages and abilities.

Reusable Tools for ANY Book

Once your child has learned the strategies, the included sentence stems and printable bookmarks can help them apply their new skills across different books and reading experiences.

Instead of needing a new worksheet every time your child reads, these reusable tools provide prompts and reminders that can be used again and again—with picture books, chapter books, informational texts, read-alouds, and independent reading.

The ultimate goal? Helping your child recognize when a comprehension strategy would be useful and begin using it independently.

What If My Child Is Struggling?

The guide also includes practical troubleshooting support.

You’ll learn what to try when your child has difficulty predicting, visualizing, connecting, questioning, summarizing, or making inferences—and when it may be helpful to return to modeling and guided practice.

The resource also helps you consider other factors that can affect comprehension, including word reading, vocabulary, background knowledge, language comprehension, and text complexity, so you can better understand what kind of support your child may need.

What’s Included

61 pages of parent guidance and printable resources, including:

• Step-by-step guidance for teaching reading comprehension

• Explicit teaching, think-aloud, guided-practice, and independent-practice examples

• 6 Parent Strategy Guides

• 30 printable comprehension activities and graphic organizers

• Sentence stems for all six strategies

• Printable strategy bookmarks

• Reusable tools that work with almost any book

• Support for children who struggle with comprehension

• Guidance for recognizing when other reading skills may be affecting understanding

Perfect For:

Parents and caregivers supporting elementary readers, homeschool families, tutors, and educators looking for practical tools to share with families.

No teaching experience is required. The guide provides the explanations, examples, and language you need to begin supporting your child during the books you’re already reading together.

Because stronger comprehension isn’t about answering more questions after reading. It’s about helping children develop the tools they need to make meaning while they read.