Monitoring comprehension

When our class reads challenging informational text for the first time we use a strategy that helps us track our thinking throughout the text. We were reading an informational piece about the skeletal system. We started each passage by circling the title. Next we numbered the first paragraph with a box and a 1 where the paragraph began. After we read the 1st paragraph, we went back to the paragraph and highlighted vocabulary that was new to us. Then we looked at the context clues to decide the meaning of the word. Finally, after each paragraph we wrote a brief statement about what the paragraph was about. It was easier to generate and answer questions about the skeletal system using this process of breaking the text down into paragraphs and sentences.