Teaching Comparing and Contrasting with Older Speech Students

Do you have students that can compare and contrast apples and bananas but struggle when it comes to reading comprehension or taking it to age-appropriate comparing and contrasting? Today we are talking all about comparing and contrasting with your older speech students.

Many teachers have already taught our students about using Venn Diagrams and it's not working, so what are other ways we can work on this? We need to teach them how to pick out what is important!

YouTube Videos

One of my favorite ways to compare and contrast is to use YouTube videos. Two videos I like are Mouse for Sale and The Present. I like to pause throughout the video and give my students a chart where we look for the character, the setting, the problem, and the solution. And I always use the model I do, We do, You do to help my students understand how the chart works and what we are looking for.

I also like to model for my student's different pre-reading strategies like what do we know about this text? Is it fiction or non fiction? What background knowledge do we have already?

Compare and Contrast Headphones Card Game

In this resource, I include a graphic that has one side for comparison and all the words or questions to look for when comparing and then the other side is for contrast and all the words and question to look for when contrasting. This kind of visual is a big help for my students.

 

As the students play this game they will read different passages on the cards and they will have to listen for words that tell them if it is either comparing or contrasting.

Compare and Contrast Stories Boom Cards

This is a good start to introduce a Venn Diagram with your students after they have a start on how to pick out important info and the keywords to look for. This activity comes with short passages followed by a Venn Diagram with important details already picked out so they can determine where that detail should go on the chart.

I hope this was helpful and you can get more tips on each of these activities in the video below.