Reading Comprehension Posters – Strategies and Skills

You’ve taught your students reading skills and reading strategies all year long, and you want to be sure they remember them. With these 24 Reading Comprehension Skills and Strategies Posters, you can give students the reading comprehension confidence they need to succeed in your classroom.

Use these reading comprehension posters as references during read alouds or to help students to set reading goals. They are perfect for both whole group and small group instruction and work with both fiction and nonfiction texts.

What is Included with the Reading Comprehension Posters

The Reading Comprehension Posters include both horizontal and vertical posters for 24 reading skills and strategies.  On each poster is:

•  The name of the strategy or skill
• Prompts that you might ask students or that they can ask each other
• A sample graphic organizer
• Sample student responses with sentence frames (when applicable).

The posters you see in these photos are a revised version of the set.  I have also included all previous versions of the posters, which have older graphics and fonts.

Which Reading Skills and Strategies are Included on the Posters

I collected these reading skills and strategies from several sources.  I looked through our reading program (which does not do a good job of consistently classifying something as a strategy or skill!), online, and a few teacher books on reading instruction.

I compiled a list of skills and strategies from those sources and narrowed it down to 24.  

I know, 24 really?!?  

Well . . . I wouldn’t necessarily teach all of these reading skill and strategies within a year, but this is what we want good readers to do throughout their elementary career, right?

Included are 17 reading skills posters:

•  Identify Main Idea & Details
• Determine Author’s Purpose
• Identify Cause & Effect
• Classify & Categorize
• Compare & Contrast
• Draw Conclusions
• Determine Fact & Opinion
• Describe Figurative Language
• Identify Genre
• Describe Plot
• Identify the Point of View
• Make Predictions
• Sequence Events
• Describe Story Structure
• Identify Explicit Information in Non-Fiction Text
• Determine Theme
• Summarize / Summarise

7 Reading Strategies Posters:

• Make Connections
• Ask Questions
• Make Inferences
• Visualize / Visualise
• Determine Important Information
• Monitor Comprehension
• Understand Text Structure

Some posters have several versions available and I have included American and British spellings for Summarize, Visualize, and Categorize.

Also included are additional display cards for types of figurative language and genres.  I plan to keep a running list throughout the year of each as we encounter them during reading.

How I Use the Reading Comprehension Posters

I created the reading comprehension posters to be reference points for myself and my students throughout the year.  I put them up on the wall as we “tackle” each reading skill or strategy in our reading program or during our whole-group reading instruction.

For example, during our read aloud of Charlotte’s Web talked about the genre and how visualize, make connections, make predictions, and summarize.  

All in a 15-20 minute read aloud.  

The best part was being able to ask a question, have the students answer it, and then tell them what skill they just demonstrated or used, referring to the poster.

As I mentioned earlier, each poster has the title, a prompt (a question related to skill or strategy) a sample graphic organizer and sentence frames (when applicable) to help students respond to the prompt in complete sentences.  

It’s all generic, so the sentence frames can be adjusted to fit the context of the book.

When I teach reading comprehension, I usually provide my students with the vocabulary and sentence structure they need to answer the questions I’m going to ask them about the text.  This is the academic language they need to successfully respond to the text.

How to Purchase the Reading Comprehension Posters

These Reading Comprehension Posters are available on my website and in my TpT store. 

Other Reading Comprehension Resources

The Reading Comprehension Posters are aligned with my other Reading Comprehension Resources, including:

• Reading Comprehension Bookmarks
• Reading Comprehension Graphic Organizers
• Reading Comprehension Reference Ring