Part I: Making Connections, Summarizing, and Questioning

*Includes a comprehensive video training resource guide

Making connections, summarizing, and generating questions are three foundational skills that effectively boost K-2 students' overall reading comprehension. In Part I of the training program viewers see teachers using a wide variety of effective strategies to teach those key skills and move children towards using them independently.

Viewers learn how to:

• effectively use daily read-aloud to model and teach components of reading comprehension
• maximize primary students' connections with text to deepen understanding of key story elements
• broaden students' text connections beyond their own life experiences
• teach students a variety of highly practical strategies and structures for summarizing text
• help students apply meaning making comprehension strategies in both fiction and nonfiction text
• engage students in developing questions before, during, and after reading to increase their comprehension of the text, their interest in the content, and their motivation for further reading
• actively involve all students, not just the most verbal, in thinking more deeply about text
• make optimal use of guided reading to boost children's comprehension
• scaffold young students' interactions with text to promote effective use of a variety of comprehension strategies

Part II: Predicting and Inferring, Visualizing, and Determining Important Content in Informational Text

*Includes a comprehensive video training resource guide

Making inferences, visualizing, and determining which facts and ideas are important can be daunting tasks for young readers. In Part II of this training program viewers observe teachers and students, grades K-2, working with practical strategies that help children access the thinking skills they need to comprehend text at deeper levels. No matter what reading program teachers are using, they will be able to incorporate these approaches and improve students' comprehension.

Viewers learn how to:

• engage students in interactive modeling as a powerful means of teaching comprehension skills
• strengthen young students' ability to comprehend below the surface of the text
• ensure that students' predictions and inferences are directly related to the text
• effectively use questioning to generate and sustain young students' inferential thinking
• transport students into text using simple, engaging re-enactment strategies
• enrich students' understanding of characters' thoughts, motivations, and emotions through the use of pictures and symbols
• help students transition from concrete visuals to mental visualizations of characters, settings, and actions
• employ a variety of organizing structures that support students' discernment of important facts and ideas in nonfiction text
• boost specific skills of comprehension with targeted, explicit instruction