This is the part of teaching comprehension that gets technical. Unfortunately I am not a professional educator. However, as a parent of a precocious reader and a homeschooler I'm obliged to learn something and so I'll pass on what I learn to you.
Comprehension in small children going from basic picture books to beginning chapter books definitely depends on the breadth of their life experiences. This is where part I of this article comes in.
However, comprehension in a child who is going from beginning chapter books to novels to complex beasts like The Chronicles of Narnia and the like, or to other types of text like recipes, labels, instructions, is quite different. Here I think there are some basic things any parent can do to facilitate the comprehension of text.
1) Point out things like chapter titles or headings. Discuss what they are for and what they are saying with relation to the text.
2) Stop periodically to ask the child to summarize what they have read orally. You might have to prompt them with questions like: what happened first? next? last? what was the basic problem? how was it solved?
3) Point out the basic organization of the text if it is anything different from paragraphs. For example, if you want to know about how long something is going to cook, usually there is a special heading at the beginning of a recipe called "cooking time".
That being said, there's something to be said for letting your child learn at their own pace. I mean, if they're a precocious reader, they're already ahead of the game, so its not like they'll be behind if you don't push them. If they read a book from end to beginning and enjoy it, well, isn't that the point? They can read it again later the "right" way and enjoy it again all new. The only caveat is that you should make sure your child doesn't learn to coast for so long that they don't actually pick up the comprehension skills when it is appropriate to do so.
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