Winter Comprehension and Language Building Activities

It can be tough to keep students interested and participating in reading comprehension practice and review. Here are a few engaging ideas to keep your students learning and progressing in reading during the winter months.

Once we hit the winter months, students often struggle to be engaged in the skills that they struggle with the most. They’ve been practice the skills for months and get bored with it. These comprehension and language activities are perfect for re-engaging your students and building in hands on practice and review.

If you have read this blog before, you already know how powerful I believe interactive and adapted books are for our students. For my very early learners, I use these winter interactive books. Students have to match the picture to the text… that can be read or listened to.

For my students who are working on higher level reading comprehension skills, I use these reading comprehension books with visuals. These books can easily be used for listening comprehension as well. The set below is from the December set.

I really like these books for practicing comprehension skills in continuous text.

When I dug deeper into our reading comprehension assessments, it was no surprise to me that the biggest stumbling block for my students were the WH questions. To specifically target answering WH questions, I developed these ask and answer photo prompts.

I really like how easy these photo prompts can be implemented. I use them during morning meeting. I laminate them back to back, so whoever is running morning meeting can ask the appropriate questions. I’ve even had students ask the questions to peers.

In reading centers, usually in the word work stations, I use these playdoh mats that target reading comprehension. Students have to use playdoh to follow the directions on the mat. We have these for all 4 seasons because my students LOVE them!!