If you’ve ever played the game “telephone” you have some idea of what can happen when a single word or phrase is misinterpreted by one person. Sometimes the meaning of what you said spirals out of control, and the whole concept of what the initial message was can be lost. Reading comprehension works a lot like this old preschool game. Oftentimes, when you read one sentence, and you mistake the meaning of what it actually says, that can color your interpretation of everything else that you read about. Reading comprehension games can really help solve this problem
Reading comprehension games can be quite fun to play in a classroom, and give teachers a lot of information about which of their students can read between the lines and which struggle with this. Older readers have great resources like the short stories of Ernest Hemmingway, who often wrote stories that didn’t have any kind of lead in, and asking questions like “what are the characters talking about?” “What’s really going on in this scene?” or “Where are the characters?” are all difficult to answer, yet very relevant. Take for example, Hills Like White Elephants. The characters in this scene are having a very serious conversation, but they never actually mention the exact subject matter that they are discussing (which is abortion, by the way, so don’t give this to those incapable of discussing the matter). Very few students will pick up on this at first, but looking over the symbolism, and the carefully worded language the characters in the scene use, it becomes a little more apparent.
Great Reading Comprehension Games from Novels
Reading mysteries, or novels like Ten Little Indians by Agatha Christie offer you the opportunity for middle school children to explore concepts like foreshadowing, and offer them the chance to identify small details in character’s appearance, or the description of how they act, to determine if they are lying or telling the truth. Some of the novels in the “Choose your own adventure” series also work well, and are geared towards third or fourth graders. Reading the books and going about the adventure as a class can offer you the ability to analyze clues and make good decisions based on what the characters are doing. What’s best about this is that it only takes a short time to do, so you can use it to fill in the gaps in between major lessons.
Reading Comprehension Games from Poetry
Another good reading comprehension game might come from having students read a poem like Jabberwocky, which is an old English poem written by Lewis Caroll that contains all kinds of nonsense words interspersed within an outline of readable English. The way that the nonsense words are interspersed amongst the text allows you to understand what they might actually mean, or at least what a general idea of them means. Therefore, this is a great poem to use when you ask students to identify words based on context clues. You might ask students for the definitions to the nonsense words like “frumious” (dangerous) or what “brillig” might be (a day of the week, possibly some kind of holiday, or maybe a time). There are many good options here, and almost any good poem could be used as a reading comprehension games if you’re willing to try it.
These are good reading comprehension games for school age children, and reading a wider variety of materials always offers you new opportunities for advancing knowledge. Good reading comprehension is important at every level, and is extremely useful as students get older and they head off to college. Teaching students some good speed reading techniques will also help them with reading comprehension games as well, believe it or not. Try using some of the other materials here on our site for some more ideas on how to teach these concepts to children of any age.