How to Actually TEACH Compare and Contrast

Today I’m continuing my series on the blog about TEACHING areas of reading comprehension. As educators, we are often really good at providing lots of practice in this area, but, in honesty, it’s a really difficult area to teach. What often happens is we throw lots of passages at our students and then pummel them with tasks such as WH questions, finding the main idea, summarizing, and sequencing. When we stop and look at the progress for our students, it can be very minimal and we wonder why they just aren’t getting it.

In this series, I share ideas on ways I actually teach these skills, not just practice them. In my examples here, the pages are taken from my Leveled Intervention: Reading Comprehension which you could buy HERE (or the No Print Distance Learning version HERE) but you can also create your own intervention from it. This is by far not the only way to teach them but my goal is provide some ideas you can take back to your students tomorrow and use. And…just in case you needed this reminder: these skills are complex and are not taught in 1 or even 2 thirty minute sessions. They take time, especially for our students who have delays in language, and that is okay.

Today’s topic is Compare and Contrast:

Teach Compare and Contrast

Again, the very first thing I do is teach them what the words “compare” and “contrast” mean. Students as young as kindergarten can start here because these are the words they are most likely to see in their classroom and on assessments. If they can learn the words “same” and “different,” they can learn “compare” and “contrast.”

Oral language is important. Saying things out loud, teaching others, and providing verbal examples all help solidify these terms.

Next, and here’s the important part (and the most likely to be skipped part), they need to be taught what these terms will look like in text. Very rarely will the text state the exact words “compare” and “contrast” but they will use “sneaky synonyms” for these words and our students need to know what these are.

Once the wording is taught, students can practice finding what the synonyms to each word.

Teach Compare and Contrast in Text

Once students know the wording of compare and contrast, they can start to apply it in text.

I begin by teaching my students to differentiate between “compare” statements and “contrast” statements.

Once they are able to do this is in sentences, you probably can guess what comes next, paragraphs.

Do you see how this approach scaffolds the tasks? Specifically, how students need to get a good grasp on the foundational tasks such as the language of compare and contrast before moving on to applying it. However, (and I’m guilty of this), so often we just throw paragraphs at our students to start with and don’t understand why they’re not getting it!

Once our students are comfortable with identifying compare and contrast, they are then able to be given topics to research and create their own compare and contrast statements.