Reading Comprehension Teaching Resources

Explore printable worksheets, digital activities and more to teach reading comprehension strategies and skills in your elementary classroom. Created by teachers, for teachers, the teaching resources in this collection are curriculum-aligned and have undergone a careful review by a member of our expert teaching team.

You'll find editable versions to easily differentiate your instruction for individual students, plus a variety of options to make lesson planning easier this school year so your students will be able to identify the main idea of a text, draw inferences, remember key details and more.

New to teaching this portion of the English curriculum or just looking for fresh and engaging ways to teach reading comprehension strategies? Read on for a primer from our teacher team!

What Is Reading Comprehension?

We'll start at the beginning! Reading comprehension is a skill that's hard to overestimate in terms of its importance for elementary students to develop.

Defined as the ability to understand and interpret written language, reading comprehension involves the process of decoding text, extracting meaning from it, and then integrating that meaning with prior knowledge and understanding.

Not only does comprehension comprise the ability to recognize and understand individual words, but it also involves the ability to recognize patterns and relationships within sentences and paragraphs.

On top of that is the ability to make inferences and draw conclusions based on the information presented.

Yes, there's a lot packed in there!

reading challenge on a student's desk

How to Teach Reading Comprehension

To develop reading comprehension, students need a variety of language skills such as vocabulary knowledge, grammar and syntax, as well as cognitive processes such as attention, memory and critical thinking.

So how do you teach reading comprehension? Like many of those foundational skills we teach in elementary grades, this isn't something kids learn in a single lesson, unit or even one school year.

Teaching reading comprehension is going to stretch from kindergarten and first grade all the way through the rest of a child's academic career (at least on the pre-college levels).

That said, here are some activities to make use of as you approach teaching reading comprehension as an elementary teacher:

Pre-Reading Activities — Brainstorming, KWL charts, prediction exercises and other "pre-reading" activities will help your students activate their prior knowledge, build background knowledge and set a purpose for reading. These are all key to developing their comprehension.
During-Reading Strategies — Teaching your students to ask questions, summarize, visualize and make connections will give students the know-how they need to monitor their comprehension as they read.
Post-Reading Activities — Reading comprehension doesn't stop when kids get to the last page of a text. It's only just beginning. That's why it's important to make sure your lesson plans include activities that help students deepen their understanding of the text and develop critical thinking skills. Examples of post-reading activities that can help build these skills include discussions, debates and written responses.