Helping with 2nd grade reading comprehension can be challenging, especially with those juggling employment and family. Almost all parents want the best for their children, but with reading comprehension, it isn’t only about the time spent helping them.

In order to keep things interesting, it often falls on carers to find additional reading comprehension activities, stories, and games. After all, when the kids get back from a day at school, they will only focus well if reading is fun.

During this period, many of us are also in a homeschooling situation due to COVID-19, and so it is even more important to keep reading interesting while also checking their level of comprehension.

Simply being able to read the words doesn’t mean they have understood the sentence, paragraph, or story.

Second Grade Reading – What to Expect

2nd grade is an important time for reading skill development. Children are generally required to reach a certain ability level, to enable them to continue learning effectively.

Here we look at some of the skills that should be developed by the end of the second grade, although earlier is obviously better.

• Reading – They should be able to read words and texts of a grade 2 level
• Decoding – They should be able to sound out words that they don’t recognize
• Comprehension – They should be able to understand what they read, find information, and understand numerous forms of written texts
• Punctuation – They should understand punctuation and how to read the text correctly without reading the punctuation aloud (such as by using tone or pausing)
• Speed – By the end of the grade, they should be able to read most texts at about 100 words per minute
• Understand Syllabification – Including breaking words into syllables, vowels, combinations, spelling rules, and plurals.

If all is going well, you should also see that your little one starts to enjoy the activity of reading. This can show up in different ways, from them hiding away with their favorite books, to trying to read almost everything they see while out and about.

Second Grade Reading Comprehension Checking

Comprehension checking activities are the only way to really increase second-grade reading comprehension levels. By having to talk about the story, the learner needs to make more of an effort to understand what they read.

Comprehension checking can be performed in numerous ways. The idea of most techniques is to push the learner to think about and relate to what they are reading. Here are a few of the approaches:

1. Reading Aloud Slowly – This gives them more time to process the meanings of words. It also allows them to hear the words and that often helps to associate words with their meanings.
2. Re-Read Favorite Stories – By re-reading stories, learners get more exposure to words they know or have recently learned. This helps to deepen their understanding of the story and the words. They also often find it easier to re-read stories they like and being able to read them can increase confidence.
3. Talk About the Story – Discussing the story and asking what they liked, how they felt, etc. can help to force the learner to think about the story more or in different ways that required to simply read it.
4. Summarize the Story – By asking them to summarize a story using their own words, the learner has to think about what happened, select the ‘key facts’ as they see them, and then retell it. This can be both a challenging activity and an interesting one, as children often see things differently to adults.
5. Fact-Finding Questions – Although this is a more basic form of comprehension, it is also a useful study skill that’s worth developing for later life. Being able to recall or scan a text for facts is useful in almost all areas of study. For these kinds of questions, you would ask something such as “why did the dog bark?”, or “what color was the car?”.
6. Moral of the Story or Opinion Based Questions – Discussing what the lesson of the story was or what they think about the situation can greatly help compassion and empathy, as well as provide a deeper understanding of the story.
7. Relate to the Readers Life Experiences – This one is brilliant for teaching understanding and also how to relate to other people’s feelings. Relating the story events to experiences the reader has had can help them to understand the characters and emotions involved in the story.

It is also vital that the learner has access to a diverse library of level-appropriate reading materials. This not only helps to prevent reading from becoming a boring task but helps to promote reading as a hobby.

Reading Comprehension Grade 2 Made Easy

All of the above approaches work well and have been proven effective. However, parents and carers don’t always have the time to work on reading comprehension for grade 2 students. Up until now, they often had to rely mostly on the school and when they had time free to go through such activities.

Fortunately, this is no longer the case. Reading apps are far more advanced and AI developments have allowed for a new form of comprehension checking. We call it “Comprehension with IVQA™”.

This new technology is a part of our Readability app. It means that the learner is asked comprehension questions by an AI at the end of reading a paragraph. They then can answer by speaking directly to the app. So, not only do they get full support while reading, the app actually checks that they understood the texts.

To see it in action, why not take our 7-day free trial for a spin and see how we can make 2nd-grade reading comprehension a lot more fun for children and their parents.