Education is a process from which concerns constantly arise both in students and in teachers, who through the experiences of each day notice an unpromising panorama in the academic, cultural and social fields, due to the little knowledge of strategies for the reading comprehension by elementary, middle and university students. This situation is reflected in the results obtained by elementary school students in the Saber tests and in the daily development within the classrooms. For this reason, it is considered opportune and necessary to overcome the achievements of the students, to work on a research project that allows to improve the reading process through the project: Metacognitive strategies to enhance reading comprehension in elementary school students. In the Master's program in Science Teaching at the Autonomous University of Manizales, this research proposal was born to improve the reading processes in the children of the institutions. The interest of the researchers as education professionals is to promote the improvement of reading comprehension in third grade students in the rural sector, through the application of metacognitive strategies in classroom work, to qualify the processes in the contents of the different subjects. It is the teachers who for several years have permanent contact with the elementary school students; That is why, after having carried out the moment of encouraging reading in the classroom as a vital space and knowing the difficulties and strengths in the students, a didactic unit was carried out to meet this objective.