Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension is a core English skill that children need in order to succeed academically and professionally.

Learning to be a skilled reader from an early age can significantly impact a child’s attainment levels across most subjects in elementary school, middle school, and beyond. Evidence suggests that young learners who regularly read for pleasure perform better academically than children who rarely read.

To help your child improve their reading comprehension skills, we’ve compiled our best tips, activities, and resources, which you’ll be able to find in the subpages above, or if you keep reading!

What is reading comprehension?

Reading comprehension is understanding the meaning of words, sentences, and paragraphs in context and being able to draw conclusions based on that understanding, such as the author’s purpose.

Reading comprehension questions students’ understanding of a text, and a number of strategies can be used to achieve that:

• Summarizing texts - to identify and understand the main idea of a text, picking out key points in a piece of writing and highlighting these for different purposes
• Visualizing texts - to build a mental image of the text they’re reading, including visualizing characters and settings
• Inferential comprehension - to draw inferences from context clues and understanding hidden meanings in a piece of writing
• Retelling - a non-fiction or fiction story
• Sequencing - to comprehend the text structure and any hidden context clues derived from the sequence of events

Typical reading development

In their first few years of study, children typically work on mastering the basics of phonics, blending and segmenting words. Once they’ve mastered these basic skills, they can become more confident at reading texts.

The next step on their reading journey is comprehending the text they’re reading. There are many different reading skills that young learners will need to lean on as they move through grade levels.

How Night Zookeeper can help

Our reading & writing program for kids makes learning fantastically fun by turning skills development into a game!

Night Zookeeper offers access to thousands of award-winning educational resources, including interactive lessons focused on reading comprehension passages and writing composition, word games to build spelling and grammar skills, and much more.

As part of the program, we offer personalized feedback on all the writing children submit for review, provide progress tracking tools to ensure steady growth, and send out free reading comprehension worksheets and other printable resources on different topics to encourage some offline learning too.

Sign up today and get a FREE 7 day trial!

Free Reading Comprehension Resource

You can practice reading comprehension skills with your child by downloading this fun activity pack based on the opening chapters of the first book in the Night Zookeeper series.

Note: this is the same PDF available across all the Reading Comprehension section.