Has your day ever started like this?

The bell rings, and in walks the class. Student A raises his hand. “What are we going to be doing today?” he asks.

“We are going to start with a reading comprehension passage,”  you tell them. (Obviously, you picked this to Improve Reading Comprehension for your students.)

As your words trail off, the classroom is filled with a chorus of heavy sighs and eye-rolls that could rival a synchronized swimming routine.

Lesson planning can be tricky because you do not want to bore these children with something they hate to do, but your job as a teacher is to find ways to help them learn.

Does it have to be so hard to improve reading comprehension for kids?

Is there a way to help kids learn while getting the data you need to help them grow as readers? The answer is yes!

I know I have told this story before, but when I started Marcy’s Mayhem, I was tutoring almost daily, and because I had taken some time off from teaching, I had no materials to use.

My primary subject to teach and still is reading, and I needed to figure out a way to reach kids without feeling like I was pulling teeth to get them to read, use their strategies, and enjoy the lessons I was teaching.

So, I sat down and wrote a set of reading comprehension passages. My goal with this set was to make the stories humorous but to hone in on different reading skills. I used the passages for the next few weeks in tutoring and was thrilled to find out my kids enjoyed reading them, and the best part was learning! Plus, by using these passages, I could identify where my students were struggling, provide targeted instruction to help them make progress, and they seemed to enjoy what they were reading.

So, with this feedback, I had to write more and started creating passages that were real-life stories, with some fiction thrown in there, and sprinkled with reading skills like the main idea, finding the theme, using context clues, and much more!

Unleashing the Fun: How to Make Reading Skills Exciting

This particular passage, Reading Rodent, is about a time when a live mouse was in my classroom! The kids were reading silently while I was working in a small group. One of the girls in my class looked nervous. When I went to talk to her, she mentioned a mouse on the bookshelf. We evacuated the classroom, while my partner teacher and I caught the mouse!

Click here to see this passage set on TPT!

This passage, Crushing The Toilet Bowl, is based on a game my husband’s football team went up against. The students on his team nicknamed the other football team the Toilet Bowl because they had beaten them several years in a row and were determined to win their game!

Click here to see this passage set on TPT!

Both of these passages are filled with reading skills like:

❀ Inference

❀ Vocabulary

❀ Text evidence

❀ Theme

❀ Character Analysis

❀ Turning point

❀ Idioms

You can access passages that captivate your student’s attention and help them improve their reading skills without
heavy sighs and eye-rolls.

Find these fun passages by clicking the button below.

CLICK HERE FOR FUN READING COMPREHENSION PASSAGES

Would you like a free reading comprehension passage to use with students? Join the Mayhem and get teaching ideas and some additional freebies.

Click the button below to get a FREE Paired Passage sent to your inbox immediately.

Click here for a FREE Paired Passage Set

You can also find me on TPT ➔ Marcy’sMayhem

& on ETSY ➔  Marcy’s Mayhem