We provide here a detailed description of the piloting of two new methods for teaching reading comprehension to beginning readers from low-income households. In Study 1, six second-grade classrooms were assigned to a control (regular teaching activities only), a vocabulary, or a strategy condition. Gains were observed for the students in the two intervention conditions, but these did not facilitate comprehension. In Study 2, an improved version of the teaching methods was tested using a design identical to the one used in Study 1. Results from Study 2 suggest that the methods are promising enough to warrant a formal evaluation of their effectiveness.