Using collaborative discussion and child-created graphic organizers to enhance read-alouds is a promising practice for scaffolding children’s comprehension of stories. The graphic organizers
became tools that helped the children structure their thinking about the story’s elements. The peer discussion enabled them to construct new knowledge and also to share it with the group.
I noticed that the combination of my initial questioning and the deliberate decrease in my direction created a context in which the children had new opportunities to take ownership and collaborate to develop more sophisticated graphic organizers. As a result, their comprehension and vocabulary test scores rose, mirroring similar rises in their individual Teacher Observation
Rating Scores. As a teacher I believe I have a new teaching strategy on which I can expand as I continue to support the reading comprehension of children in
future classrooms.