The goal of this practice guide is to offer educators specific, evidence-based recommendations for teaching foundational reading skills to students in kindergarten through 3rd grade. This guide is a companion to the existing practice guide, "Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade", and as a set, these guides…

This resource is part of a series produced by the Center for Standards and Assessment Implementation (CSAI) to assist teachers and those who support teachers to plan teaching and learning from College and Career Ready Standards (CCRS) for all students, including students with disabilities, English learners, academically at-risk students, students…

Strong reading comprehension skills are central not only to academic and professional success, but also to a productive social and civic life. These skills build the capacity to learn independently, to absorb information on a variety of topics, to enjoy reading, and to experience literature more deeply. Despite the growing demand for highly…

Writers carefully include critical information in the opening lines of their chapters, but students often gloss over these beginning sentences, missing information that could help them better comprehend the text. To address this concern, the authors created a strategy that prompts students to examine the opening lines of chapters, helping readers…

Focuses on a general document navigation strategy called the known/need-to-know strategy. Illustrates the strategy using a variant of this strategy called "locate." (SR)

Reviews document strategies called "locate tasks." Discusses "cycle tasks," tasks requiring two or more locate tasks, repeating the known/need-to-know steps, thus cycling to earlier steps in the known/need-to-know procedure. (SR)

Describes the "story face," an adaptation of story mapping that provides a visual framework for understanding, identifying, and remembering elements in narrative text. Discusses several strengths of the story face strategy used with students in grades 1-5: easy to construct, easy to remember, can guide retelling, is collaboratively…

Presents an instrument to observe students' quantitative literacy abilities. Discusses document strategy factors and quantitative factors contributing to task difficulty. (SR)

Middle school students will interact with a variety of different texts to uncover a broader meaning of reading. During the three 50-minute sessions, students will identify different categories of text materials from basic picture books to textbooks; compile a list of strategies and processes needed to read the different types of books; and develop…

Discusses three types of integration tasks in reading, rank ordering, first-level integration (looking for similarities within a list of items), and second-level integration tasks (looking for differences). Offers classroom extension activities. (SR)

Discusses using the procedures of identification, problem formulation, and computation to solve two different types of math document problems: those involving locate procedures and those involving cycling procedures. (SR)

Hands-on explorations can be extended through interactions with informational texts, enhancing both science learning and literacy development. In this article, the author describes a primary-grade science activity that begins with students examining pine cones and sharing their experiences and observations with peers. The students then generate…

Describes three "generate" strategies for seeking information in text when expected clues are missing. (SR)

Describes how creative mapping (a pictorial version of semantic mapping) helps students organize or recognize organization in expository texts. (SR)

Describes the idea of creating a glove for each of the comprehension strategies for use with different text structures. Notes that the gloves serve as a multisensory approach by providing visual clues through icons on each finger and the palm. Discusses three different gloves: the prereading glove, the narrative text structure glove, and the…