Building Bridges of Understanding

‘Building Bridges of Understanding’, is a reading comprehension programme aimed at giving children the

strategies they need to become good readers.  By learning about these strategies, children can become

more involved in the text they are reading or hearing, and so deepen their understanding of the text

The Comprehension strategies are :


Prediction

Visualisation

Making Connections

Questioning

Clarifying

Declunking

Inferring

Determining Importance

Synthesis


For each strategy children learn a sign or action (called a comprehension processing motion or ‘CPM’) to

indicate when they want to use that strategy during class reading



We will begin the 'Building Bridges of Understanding ' Programme in February 2016. This year we will be

focusing on the strategies of Prediction, Visualisation and Making Connections.



1) Prediction: Children make a ‘P’ sign to indicate when they want to make a prediction. Predictions can be

made before, during or even after the story. Good readers make predictions (good guesses) about what

might happen next in the story, using information they have gathered from the book cover, the blurb, the

pictures etc. so far. Predictions do not have to be right. As they hear more of the story, the children’s

predictions may change.



2)Visualizing: Visualizing while reading is like having a movie in your head of what is happening in the story.

Good readers can have a picture in their head, but other senses such as sounds, smells and feelings are

also used



3)Making Connections: Good readers make connections between what they read in the story and things that

have happened to them or to people they know. They can also make connections to other books they have

read, movies they have seen, or things that are happening or have happened in the world. So these

connections can be text-to-text, text-to-self or text-to-the-wider-world.



Strategies to be continued next year :



Questioning: Children make a ‘W’ sign for ‘I wonder why . . .’ Good readers ask themselves questions

before, during and after reading. These questions can be generated by what they have read or seen in the

book, or sometimes what is not shown or said in the text. Some questions can be left unanswered by the

author and then good readers will use their own interpretation of the story to come up with their own

answers.



Clarifying: Children make a ‘C’ sign to indicate they need something clarified. This could be a word, phrase

or idea that is confusing and needs further explanation. Good readers make sure that what they are reading

makes sense to them, and so they stop to clarify the story when they are confused.



Declunking: When a reader comes across a word that they cannot understand (when they have a Clunk),

then they need to ‘declunk’ it.  The children learn techniques for decoding these words through the

declunking strategy, breaking the words down into prefixes, suffixes etc.



Inferring: Children make an ‘i’ symbol to show they want to infer. Through the inferring strategy, children

learn how to read the ‘invisible ink’ of the story, reading between the lines to determine what the author is

hinting at, but not saying directly.



Determining Importance: While reading a text, good readers separate out the essential and non-essential

information and thereby determine what is important in the text. The determining importance strategy

enables children to identify, sort and order the key pieces of information in the text.



Synthesis: Synthesis is the skill of combining all the comprehension strategies and applying them before,

during and after reading, so that the reader constructs their own individual meaning from the text..