This article reviews theoretical and research evidence to support the explicit and systematic teaching of five comprehension strategies that will help all students tackle expository texts with success. The article explains the "High 5!" strategies and how to teach them. An example of a lesson is included to show how the five strategies connect…

The Text Feature Walk is a structure created and employed by the authors that guides students in the reading of text features in order to access prior knowledge, make connections, and set a purpose for reading expository text. Results from a pilot study are described in order to illustrate the benefits of using the Text Feature Walk over…

Describes "character maps," an activity that draws upon the reader's prior knowledge of people to understand a book's characters. Includes a brief list of additional activities and extensions to reinforce comprehension through characterization. (RS)

Describes a three-step process to help teachers honor what children bring to each reading situation and to model for children the importance of accessing appropriate knowledge sources before reading. (FL)

Argues that children need to be taught how to extract, synthesize, organize, and integrate important information from texts into their own knowledge structures and describes some techniques that can be used to activate prior knowledge. (HOD)

In this study, the author adapted reciprocal teaching strategies for use with her kindergarten students. Using puppets to help model strategies, she implemented a series of lessons that showed students how to retell, ask questions, and predict what would happen in a story that was read aloud. The purpose was to provide students with comprehension…