workbooks for comprehension?

The question is: Is the child really having trouble with comprehension. Or is the child a poor reader because s/he can’t decode (sound out) words.
A lot of kids who have trouble with decoding, have poor comprehension. But it makes sense. If you can’t figure out the words, how can you understnd the text? If he can understand if you read to him MUCH better,
then he may not have a big problem with comprehension.

If he does, I’d recommend something like Visualizing and Verbalizing by Lindamood Bell. This is not a workbook but a set of exercises designed to teach comprehension. If the problem is decoding you need to work on that. I don’t know if this is your own child or a student so we maybe need more info.

—des

First. I agree completely with des. Make sure the student is actually *reading* and not doing a complex guess-and-fake. Have the student read aloud to you from some Grade 2 and beginning 3 materials, which should have been mastered (ie a step below the supposed instructional level); if there are more than five major errors on a page (not knowing *any* word, including the “little” ones is a major error), or if the student stops and either guesses wildly or stalls at every word beyond Grade 2 level, your problem is basic skills, not comprehension.

If indeed you do need to work on comprehension, here’s one thing I do: I have collected some older basal readers from high-quality literature-based series, plus the workbooks that go with them. It takes looking, but you can find these in school book closets, retired teachers’ files, Amazon auctions and zshops, etc. If you can find a good series, the planning and effort that went into these workbooks is amazing. The more you work with the book the more you discover about the planning behind it. A good workbook will include vocabulary recognition, vocabulary usage, grammar, logical consequences, inferences, ordering, independent writing of sentences, and many more skills; and it will work gradually, steadily increasing in difficulty over the program.

If you can’t find something appropriate that way, you can look at teachers’ supply places. Warning — buyer beware. Just as when you walk into a store you see lots of flashy junk that’s not worth the money, you see the exact same flashy junk in online stores. However, if you buy with care, a place I frequently recommend is Scholar’s Choice at scholarschoice.ca (note .ca, NOT .com). They have a number of comprehension workbooks listed on their site. They have low prices and deliver quickly all over North America. Some of their stock is good and some is junk, so think carefully and check if there’s a return policy.

Agree with everybody :-)
“reads at third grade level” — that can mean a whole lot of things. How old is this person? Is the third grade level comprehension, decoding, or what?

Joanne Carlisle’s Reasoning and REading series is a favorite of mine, but does NOT have enough practice of the skills it presents, so I make a lot more based on the child’s interests.

You can also find a mess of “read the passage and answer the questions” kinds of practice, which are useful if what the kid’s lacking is focused practice, especially if you’ll go over them and figure out *how* to answer those questions. Jamestown Press has Specific Skills series’ that focus on things like inferences and main ideas, with 100 short passages in each booklet. However, with all of these, the usefulness goes down as the time spent helping the student figure out how to comprehend goes down. It can be a fine line between practice ande busy work.