The Use of Hands-On Comprehension Games in Literacy Development

Abstract

Reading comprehension is one of the most difficult components to teach. I have tried every resource my district has given me to help build comprehension skills and I have not seen a significant impact on the children’s learning. I investigated hands-on games and activities to see if they could help improve and build comprehension skills. Many children in the twenty-first century are tactile learners and need hands-on activities. Keeping this in mind I researched and implemented hands-on games and activities for students in the fifth-grade to practice and reinforce their comprehension skills. I created, taught through guided practice, and reinforced a variety of new games and activities to assist in improving a variety of comprehension skills ranging from basic (5 W's: who, what, where, why, when) to deeper meaning such as inference. I wanted to see if hands-on games or activities had an impact on comprehension skills. I was focused on Marcell's (2006) ideas and implementation of comprehension games and activities from "Comprehension Clinchers." Marcell discusses the "Big Four" which consists of metacognitive, visualizing, predicting, and connecting strategies. I performed a six-week long qualitative study focused on skills in comprehension using hands-on activities. I observed and analyzed the work of two fifth graders. I implemented two reading-center games focused on comprehension skills. I explored whether the implementation of comprehension focused, hands-on learning activities in a classroom setting have either positive impact or no impact on students' reading comprehension.