How can highlighters help with reading comprehension?
If your child is struggling with reading comprehension, you might be surprised to learn that one of the most effective tools is already sitting in their pencil case. Highlighters — when used with intention — can completely change the way a student interacts with text, and we see this every day working with students across Queens, from Fresh Meadows and Bayside to Flushing, Jamaica, and Forest Hills.
The problem most students run into isn't a lack of effort. It's a lack of direction. When a child is told to "read and highlight the important parts," they end up with an entire page of neon yellow and no better understanding than when they started. That's because highlighting without purpose is just coloring. The key is giving your child a specific reason to pick up that highlighter before they even start reading.
Four Ways to Highlight With Purpose
At SparkBrain Learning, we teach our reading students to highlight for a specific purpose every time they sit down with a text. Here are four strategies we use in our one-on-one reading sessions that parents can start practicing at home right away:
1. Highlight for New or Unknown Words
When your child comes across a word they don't recognize or can't define, that word gets highlighted. This does two things — it slows them down in the moment so they don't just skip past it, and it creates a ready-made vocabulary list they can come back to after reading. For students preparing for the NY State ELA exam or building foundational reading skills, vocabulary development is one of the biggest levers for improving comprehension. We work on this extensively in our reading program, where students build personalized word banks session by session.
2. Highlight for New Information
This strategy teaches students to distinguish between what they already knew and what the text is actually teaching them. It sounds simple, but it's a critical thinking skill that many elementary and middle school students in Queens haven't been explicitly taught. When a child highlights new information, they're actively processing the text instead of passively scanning it. They start to notice what the author is trying to communicate, which is the foundation of comprehension.
3. Highlight for Evidence When Answering Questions
This is especially important for students in grades 3 through 8 who are preparing for the New York State ELA assessments. The state test requires students to cite text evidence in their responses — they can't just write what they think, they need to prove it from the passage. Teaching your child to highlight evidence as they read trains them to approach every text like a detective looking for proof. By the time they get to the questions, half the work is already done. This is one of the core strategies we drill in our state test prep sessions and it makes a noticeable difference in how students structure their answers.
4. Highlight for Main Idea and Supporting Details
Identifying the main idea is one of the most commonly tested reading skills across every grade level, and it's also one of the hardest for students to master. A lot of kids confuse a detail with the main idea, or they can tell you what happened in a passage but can't summarize what it was really about. Highlighting specifically for main idea versus supporting details forces students to evaluate each sentence and decide what role it plays in the text. That kind of analytical reading builds skills that carry through middle school, high school, and beyond.
The Color-Coding Strategy That Makes It Click
Beyond these four approaches, one of the most powerful techniques we teach at SparkBrain is color-coded highlighting. Instead of using one color for everything, students assign different colors to different categories of information.
Here's an example: say your child is reading a nonfiction article about a famous painter. The article discusses both the painter's artistic talent and their generosity and big heart. Your child could highlight every detail about talent in yellow and every detail about character in blue. Suddenly, what felt like a wall of text becomes organized, visual, and easy to reference.
This works across subjects and grade levels. A 4th grader reading about ecosystems could highlight animals in one color and habitats in another. A 7th grader studying the American Revolution could separate causes from effects. An 8th grader prepping for the SHSAT could use it to break apart reading comprehension passages and identify argument structure.
The color-coding strategy is especially effective for visual learners, and we've seen students across our Fresh Meadows tutoring center have real lightbulb moments when they start organizing text this way.
The Real Secret: Reading With Intention
All of these strategies come back to one principle — reading with intention. Before your child picks up a highlighter, they should know exactly what they're looking for. Are they hunting for vocabulary? Collecting evidence? Separating main ideas from details? Sorting information by category?
When a student knows the purpose before they start reading, their focus sharpens, their engagement increases, and their comprehension improves naturally. It's not about highlighting more — it's about highlighting smarter.
Why It's Hard to Teach This at Home (And That's Okay)
We talk to parents in Queens every week who are doing everything they can to help their kids with reading at home. And the truth is, it's not always easy for parents to teach their own children — not because they don't know the material, but because there's an emotional dynamic that makes it harder. Your child might push back, get frustrated, or shut down in ways they never would with an outside tutor. That's completely normal.
That's exactly why SparkBrain Learning exists. Our founder, Vera Borukhov, is a licensed educator and literacy specialist who has spent years developing structured, research-backed reading programs for students of all levels. When students come to our tutoring center in Fresh Meadows, they work one-on-one with an expert who can teach these strategies in a patient, structured environment — without the emotional weight that comes with parent-child dynamics.
How SparkBrain Learning Can Help Your Child
If your child is struggling with reading comprehension — whether they're in kindergarten just learning to decode, or in 8th grade preparing for the NY State ELA exam — we can help. Our reading program is built around proven strategies like the highlighting techniques in this post, plus phonics instruction, fluency building, vocabulary development, and critical thinking exercises.
We work with students across Queens, including families from Fresh Meadows, Bayside, Flushing, Jamaica Estates, Kew Gardens Hills, Forest Hills, Whitestone, Little Neck, Douglaston, and beyond. Every student gets a personalized plan based on where they are and where they need to go.
Highlighters are just one tool in the toolbox. In our next post, we'll be talking about how to develop critical thinking skills while reading — another game-changer for comprehension. Stay tuned.
Ready to get started? Text or call us at (718) 790-8911 and we'll set up a free conversation about how we can help your child become a stronger, more confident reader. You can also visit us at our Fresh Meadows location at 69-04 Fresh Meadow Lane.