Newsletter – Bee Books and Fun – July 25, 2025

I was listening to the Knowledge Matters Campaign podcast (season 2, episode 3), and I finally heard some folks talking about reading comprehension in a way that made sense to me. The following question was posed, and it made me think.
When was the last time you finished a chapter of a book and thought,
“Hmmm, what was the main idea?”

David and Meredith Liben shared in this podcast episode that readers focus on the text itself while teachers make reading text about strategies such as making inferences and predictions. David and Meredith describe the teaching of strategies as “the tail wagging the dog,” and I feel that.

I remember when a colleague said that she organized her students into “strategy groups.” I couldn’t make that make sense in my mind. I couldn’t absorb how teaching strategies equipped kids to read. From my perspective, there is one “strategy.” We make the sounds we see, knowing what we know about how words work through explicit, systematic phonics instruction, and we make sense of it knowing what we know about the meanings of those words and their parts and how they’re organized within the sentences. Will meaning break down from time to time? Sure. Lacking vocabulary and/or background knowledge or unfamiliar idioms or increased cognitive load when decoding challenging words can all impede our ability to make meaning from text. Sometimes we’re simply not paying attention. There are many obstacles when it comes the making of meaning from texts, but using strategies will surely fail our students. Our academic attention should land in the realm of reading LOTS of books, actively exploring the world around us, deliberately attending to the words we see and hear, and making the process of learning interesting.

At Book Bums, we have eight comprehension-focused lessons, but they’re not teaching kids to use strategies. They teach kids about why meaning might break down in a text, and they share practical exercises that equip kids to think about their own thinking and why we might not “get” all that we read. That seems to align with what these educators are sharing as well.

Typically, when kids don’t comprehend text (and they can comprehend oral language), the problem stems from poor decoding skills. There are times when kids read accurately and still don’t understand what they’re reading, but outside of kids learning English as a second language, these instances are extraordinarily rare.

The podcast hosts differentiate between teachers teaching themes (like teamwork) and teaching topics (like bees). They posit that teaching themes in classrooms is not an effective approach because multiple, vastly varied texts under the same theme umbrella are used and they yield little depth of knowledge for students. Delving deeply into a particular topic promotes a rich knowing that can complement the learning of new topics.

Remember that lacking vocabulary and/or background knowledge impedes reading comprehension. Making an effort to grow kids’ knowledge is a just right task that kids actually enjoy, and that sounds good to me.