Understanding the science behind reading and implementing the necessary strategies to help readers build a solid foundation is essential to establishing fundamental reading skills.
The other essential aspect of reading is comprehension. To understand what they read, readers engage a wide variety of thinking skills so that they are actively constructing a mental model — the movie that you see in your mind when you read. For those of us who are proficient readers, it is something that we do automatically; we’re typically not even aware of it unless and until our comprehension breaks down. But many struggling readers don’t know how to activate those thinking skills and, as a result, they have difficulty making sense of what they read.