Components and Organization
Each K-2 and 3-6 set includes three main components:
- Research-based strategy and lesson books
- Informational texts
- Professional support and resources
Research-Based Strategy Books
The teaching and learning focus in The Comprehension Toolkit series centers on six strategy books organized around fundamental comprehension strategies:
- Monitor Comprehension identifies ways readers keep track of their thinking and monitor their understanding as they read.
- Activate and Connect alerts students to the impact background knowledge has on their learning and supports them to connect the new to the known.
- Ask Questions highlights how readers can use questions to clarify unfamiliar ideas and discover new information.
- Infer & Visualize Meaning teaches students how to use context clues and text evidence to crack open the new concepts and big ideas in a text.
- Determine Importance helps students identify, organize, and share the important ideas and information in a text.
- Summarize and Synthesize encourages students to go beyond the simple restating of facts, to pull together their thinking, and use all the strategies to understand big ideas.
- New to the Toolkit’s 2nd edition, Content Literacy:Lessons and Texts for Comprehension Across the Curriculum – contains new lessons that integrates and extends all six strategies across the curriculum.
Each strategy lesson guide provides a lesson frame, modeling and language to follow the ready-to-go lessons at any grade level, as well as suggestions for designing new strategy lessons to fit any curriculum.
Informational Text
The Comprehension Toolkit series lets students explore comprehension strategies through engaging, real-world informational texts.
- Articles from magazines as well as short informational articles specially written for the Toolkit series provide engaging nonfiction texts directly tied to activities and lessons in the strategy books. (In addition, for grades K-2, posters are included from TIME For Kids Bigger Picture Edition and National Geographic Young Explorer.)
- A digital companion resource provides all of the texts and teaching resources in a full color reproducible format.
- Optional trade books referenced in the Toolkit lessons
Professional Support
The Comprehension Toolkit series, has a commitment to elevating teacher expertise through embedded professional development. Within the Comprehension Toolkit, the authors mentor the educator along the way through scaffolded and modeled lessons, teaching tips, lesson previews, and much more.
The professional resources introduce, support and extend core lessons.
- A Teacher’s Guide provides an overview of the Toolkit’s research, philosophy, components, instructional design, assessment options, and shows how to integrate the Toolkit into varied classroom literacy scenarios.
- Online resources provide videos of modeled Toolkit lessons and author interviews to support day-to-day teaching incorporating author narrated lessons in action, and print resources with think sheets, assessment masters, record-keeping forms, lesson texts, research articles and full-color lesson texts.
