Building reading comprehension skills in the special education classroom does not have to be hard. I like to differentiate response types for students so we can provide prompting and fade to independent answering of questions. When it comes to reading comprehension, I feel like a lot of teachers get stuck the same response types. Over the years, I have used a variety of different response types. I’ve gathered up 4 of my favs and I’m sharing them here. Are you ready to check them out?
These are 4 ways I’m differentiating for student responses during reading comprehension activities:
1. Cut and Paste
When I start working on reading responses with students, I’ll often work with a cut and paste response page. This provides a lot of the information for students, they just need to place the response items in order. Providing some visual support as we get started will help students understand how to answer questions. Another perk is that we can practice putting the story in order multiple times before pasting them onto our paper. In our classroom, we will often practice putting the pieces in order twice during the week. We will paste our responses after our second retelling of the story.
2. Multiple Choice
To provide students with a little less support, I move to multiple choice responses. I like to keep the visual support for students who are just learning to respond to questions. Students can circle, color, or use a bingo dotter (a class favorite) to indicate their responses. This is a great way to move towards writing a response for comprehension questions. It’s also a familiar questioning style they will see on testing, so it’s a great way to practice choosing an answer.
3. Sentence Frames
Once my students really start to get writing, I love using sentence frames in the classroom. Many of my sentence frames allow for students to fill in a word or phrase to answer a question about a text they have read. This is a great way to get students starting to provide written responses to comprehension questions.
4. Sentence Writing
Once we’re really rocking our writing skills, I’ll up the ante and have students write a sentence response to comprehension questions. Of course this comes with a lot of modeling and practice, but given scaffolding and support, students are able to quickly pick this up.
These are some of the ways I differentiate for reading comprehension responses. I’ve used a few other response types when working on specific skills (like sequencing or visualizing), but these 4 response types are my tried and true methods when it comes to teaching students to answer comprehension questions.
Want to grab some reading comprehension books to use in your classroom? I put together a set of sequencing books with 6 different response sheets for your classroom. Check them out here.
