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ADDED: August 2026- Text Set & Core Text Selection EKC Padlet

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ADDED: August 2026- Text Set & Core Text Selection EKC Padlet

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Building Background Knowledge Through Reading: Rethinking Text Sets

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Building Background Knowledge Through Reading: Rethinking Text Sets

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Achieve the Core

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With the Fire on High
By Elizabeth Acevedo
Harper Collins/Harper Teen

The Undefeated
By Kwame Alexander
Illus. by Kadir Nelson
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Orange for the Sunsets
By Tina Athaide
Harper Collins/Katherine Tegen Books

Feed Your Mind: A Story of August Wilson
By Jen Bryant
Illus. Cannaday Chapman
Abrams/Abrams Books for Young Readers

Martin & Anne, The Kindred Spirits of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Anne Frank
By Nancy Churnin
Illus. by Yevgenia Nayberg
Creston Books

New Kid
By Jerry Craft
Harper Collins/Harper

Planting Stories: The Life of Librarian and Storyteller Pura Belpré
By Anika Aldamuy Denise
Illus. by Paola Escobar
Harper Collins/Harper

Dreams from Many Rivers
By Margarita Engle
Illus. Beatriz Gutierrez Hernandez
Macmillan/Henry Holt/ Godwin Books

Todos Iquales / All Equal: Un corridor de Lemon Grove/ A Ballad of Lemon Grove
By Christy Hale
Lee & Low Books/Children's Books Press

Downstairs Girl
By Stacey Lee
Penguin Random House/Penguin/G.P. Putnam's Sons

Paper Son: The Inspiring Story of Tyrus Wong, Immigrant and Artist
By Julie Leung
Illus. Chris Sasaki
Penguin Random House/Random House/Schwartz & Wade

The Book Rescuer: How a Mensch from Massachusetts Saved Yiddish Literature for Generations to Come
By Sue Macy
Illus. Stacy Innerst
Simon & Schuster/A Paula Wiseman Book

Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story
By Kevin Noble Maillard
Illus. by Juana Martinez-Neal
Roaring Brook Press

Indian No More
By Charlene Willing McManis with Traci Sorell
Lee & Low Books/Tu Books

Lubna and Pebble
By Wendy Meddour
Illus. by Daniel Egenėus
Penguin Random House/Random House/Dial Books

Under the Broken Sky
By Mariko Nagai
Henry Holt/Christy Ottaviano Books

Thanku: Poems of Gratitude
By Miranda Paul (Ed.)
Illus. by Marlena Myles
Lerner/Millbrook Press

Mario and the Hole in the Sky: How a Chemist Saved Our Planet
By Elizabeth Rusch
Illus. by Teresa Martinez
Charlesbridge

The Moon Within
By Aida Salazar
Scholastic/Arthur A. Levine Books

At the Mountain's Base
By Traci Sorell
Illus. Weshoyot Alvitre
Penguin Random House/Penguin/Kokila WESHOYOT ALVITRE

Room on Our Rock
By Kate and Jol Temple
Illus. by Terri Rose Baynton
Kane Miller

Soldier for Equality: Josė de la Luz Sáenz and the Great War
By Duncan Tonatiuh
Abrams/Abrams Books for Young Readers

The Bridge Home
By Padma Venkatraman
Penguin Random House/Nancy Paulsen Books

The Other Side: Stories of Central American Teen
Refugees Who Dream of Crossing the Border
By Juan Pablo Villalobos
Macmillan/Farrar Straus Giroux

Other Words for Home
By Jasmine Warga
Harper Collins/Balzer + Bray

What Do You Do With A Voice Like That?
By Chris Barton
Illus. by Ekua Holmes
Beach Lane Books

Counting on Katherine
By Helene Becker
Illus. by Dow Phumiruk
Henry Holt/Christy Ottaviano

Finding Langston
By Lesa Cline-Ransome
Holiday House

The Day War Came
By Nicola Davies
Illus. by Rebecca Cobb
Candlewick Press

Love
By Matt de la Peña
Illus. by Loren Long
Penguin Random House/
G.P. Putnam's Sons

The Crossroads
By Alexandra Diaz
Simon Schuster/Paula Wiseman Books

The War Outside
By Monica Hesse
Little, Brown

The Night Diary
By Veera HIranandani
Penguin Group/Dial

Write On, Irving Berlin!
By Leslie Kimmelman
Illus. by David C. Gardner
Sleeping Bear Press

Saffron Ice Cream
By Rashin Kheiriyeh
Scholastic/Arthur A. Levine Books

Drawn Together
By Minh Lê
Illus. by Dan Santat
Disney/Hyperion

Alma and How She Got Her Name
By Juana Martinez-Neal
Candlewick Press

La Frontera: El v iaje con papá-My Journey with Papa
By Deborah Mills and Alfredo Alva
Illus. by Claudia Navarro
Barefoot Books

Dreamers
By Yuyi Morales
Neal Porter Books

All Are Welcome
By Alexandra Penfold
Illus. by Suzanne Kaufman
Random House/Alfred A. Knopf Books

Ghost Boys
By Jewell Parker Rhodes
Little, Brown

Playing Atari with Saddam Hussein
By Jennifer Roy
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Amal Unbound
By Aisha Saeed
Penguin Random House/
Nancy Paulsen Books

Too Young to Escape: A Vietnamese Girl Waits to be Reunited with Her Family
By Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch
and Van Ho
Pajama Press

The Cardboard Kingdom
By Chad Sell
Random House/Alfred A. Knopf/
Borzoi Books

We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga
By Traci Sorell
Illus. by Frané Lessac
Charlesbridge

Mommy's Khimar
By Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow
Illus. by Ebony Glenn
Simon & Schuster/Salaam Reads

The Prince and the Dressmaker
By Jen Wang
Roaring Brook Press/First Second

The Day You Begin
By Jacqueline Woodson
Illus. by Rafael López
Penguin Random House/
Nancy Paulsen Books

OUT OF WONDER: POEMS CELEBRATING POETS
Edited by Kwame Alexander
Illus. by Ekua Holmes
Candlewick

WHY AM I ME?
By Paige Britt, Sean Qualls, and Selina Alko
Scholastic

WISHTREE
By Katherine Applegate
Illus. by Charles Santoso
Feiwel & Friends

WALKING WITH MISS MILLIE
By Tamara Bundy
Penguin Group /Nancy Paulsen Books

LUCKY BROKEN GIRL
By Ruth Beha
Penguin Group/Nancy Paulsen Books

#NOT YOUR PRINCESS: Voices of Native American Women
Edited by Lisa Charleyboy and Mary Beth Leatherdale
Annick Press

STOLEN WORDS
By Melanie Florence
Illus. by Gabrielle Grimard
Second Story Press

I LOVE MY PURSE
By Belle DeMont
Illus. by Sonja Wimmer
Annick Press

AN UNINTERRUPTED VIEW OF THE SKY
By Melanie Crowder
Penguin Group/Philomel

MY BEAUTIFUL BIRDS
By Suzanne Del Rizzo
Pajama Press

LETTERS TO A PRISONER
By Jacques Goldskyn
Owlkids Books

HER RIGHT FOOT
By Dave Eggers
Illus. by Shawn Harris
Chronicle Books

YO SOY MUSLIM: A FATHER'S LETTER TO HIS DAUGHTER
By Mark Gonzalez
Illus. by Mehrdokht Amini
Simon & Schuster Books

STORMY SEAS: STORIES OF YOUNG BOAT REFUGEES
By Mary Beth Leatherdale and Eleanor Shakespeare
Annick Press

ONE LAST WORD
By Nikki Grimes
Bloomsbury

TRELL
By Dick Lehr
Candlewick Press

DREAMLAND BURNING
By Jennifer Latham
Little Brown

WHERE WILL I LIVE?
By Rosemary McCarney
Second Story Press

FLYING LESSONS
Edited by Ellen Oh
Crown

SILENT DAYS, SILENT DREAMS
By Allen Say

LONG WAY DOWN
By Jason Reynolds
Simon & Schuster

THE 57 BUS
By Dashka Slater
Farrar, Strauss, Giroux

MAYA LIN: THINKING WITH HER HANDS
By Susan Goldman Rubin
Chronicle Books

PIECING ME TOGETHER
by Renee Watson
Bloomsbury​

Balcony on the Moon
By Ibtisam Barakat
Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Macmillan
Talking Leaves
By Joseph Bruchac
Dial Books
Freedom Over Me
by Don Brown
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Watched: Someone Is Always Watching
By Marina Budhos
Wendy Lamb Books
Missing Nimama
By Melanie Florence
Illus. by Francois Thisdale
Clockwise Press
The Bone Sparrow
By Zana Fraillon
Disney Hyperion
The Tree in the Courtyard
By Jeff Gottesfeld
Illus. by Peter McCarty
Knopf Books for Young Readers
Vietnam: A History of the War
By Russell Freedman
Holiday House
Garvey's Choice
By Nikki Grimes
WordSong
Girl in the Blue Coat
By Monica Hesse
Little, Brown
Ada's Violin: The Story of the Recycled Orchestra of Paraguay
By Susan Hood
Illus. by Sally Wern
Comport Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

By Jung Jin-Ho
Holiday House
Every Falling Star
By Sungju Lee
Harry N. Abrams
I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark
By Debbie Levy
Illus. by Elizabeth Baddeley
Simon & Schuster
A Long Pitch Home
By Natalie Dias Lorenzi
Charlesbridge
Juana & Lucas
By Juana Medina
Candlewick Press
This Land Is Our Land: A History of America
By Linda Barrett Osborne
Abrams
A Poem for Peter: The Story of Ezra Jack Keats and the Creation of the Snowy Day
By Andrea Davis Pinkney
Illus. by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher
Viking Books for Young Readers
Towers Falling
By Jewell Parker Rhodes
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Stepping Stones: A Refugee Family's Journey
By Margriet Ruurs
Illus. by Nizar Badr
Orca Press
Salt to the Sea
By Ruda Sepatis
Philomel Books
Sachiko: A Nagasaki Bomb Survivor's Story
By Caren Stelson
Lerner/Carolrhoda
The Sound of All Things
By Myron Uhlberg
Illus. by Ted Papoulas
Peachtree Publishers
Freedom in Congo Square
By Carole Boston Weatherford
Illus. by R. Gregory Christie
Little bee books
Esquivel! Space-Age Sound Artist
by Susan Wood
Illus. by Duncan Tonatiuh
Charlesbrid

AUDACITY
by Melanie Crowder
Penguin Random House
BREAKTHROUGH: HOW THREE PEOPLE SAVED "BLUE BABIES" AND CHANGED MEDICINE FOREVER
by Jim Murphy
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
DROWNED CITY: HURRICANE KATRINA & NEW ORLEANS
by Don Brown
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ORBITING JUPITER
by Gary B. Schmidt
Clarion Books
RED
by Jan De Kinder; Translated by Laura Watkinson
Eerdmans Books for Young Readers
DRUM DREAM GIRL: HOW ONE GIRL'S COURAGE CHANGED MUSIC
by Margarita Engle; illus. by Rafael López
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
MY STORY, MY DANCE: ROBERT BATTLE'S JOURNEY TO ALVIN AILEY
by Lesa Cline-Ransome; illus. by James E. Ransome
Simon & Schuster
ECHO
by Pam Muñoz Ryan
Scholastic Press
FUNNY BONES: POSADA AND HIS DAY OF THE DEAD CALAVERAS
by Duncan Tonatiuh
Harry N. Abrams
GAME CHANGER: JOHN McCLENDON AND THE SECRET GAME
by John Coy; illus. by Randy DuBurke
Carolrhoda Books
GEORGE
by Alex Gino
Scholastic
IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF CRAZY HORSE
By Joseph Marshall III, illustrated by Jim Yellowhawk
Abrams: Amulet
JUNA'S JAR
by Jane Bahk; Illlus. By Felicia Hoshino.
Lee & Low
LAST STOP ON MARKET STREET
by Matt De La Peña
Penguin/G.P. Putnam
MAYA'S BLANKET/LE MANTA DE MAYA
by Monica Brown; Illus. by David Diaz
Lee & Low
RUBY ON THE OUTSIDE
by Nora Raleigh Baskin
Simon & Schuster
SITTING BULL: LAKOTA WARRIOR AND DEFENDER OF HIS PEOPLE
by S. D. Nelson
Abrams
STELLA BY STARLIGHT
by Sharon Draper
Simon & Schuster
STONE ANGEL
by Jane Yolen; illus. by Katie May Green
Philomel
THE POETRY FRIDAY ANTHOLOGY FOR CELEBRATIONS
Sylvia Vardell & Janet Wong, Eds.
Pomelo Books
TIGER BOY
by Mitali Perkins
Charlesbridge
TWO WHITE RABBITS
by Jairo Buitrago, illus. by Rafael Yockteng; trans. by Elisa Amado
Groundwood
TUCKY JO AND LITTLE HEART
by Patricia Polacco
Simon & Schuster
WANGARI MAATHAI: THE WOMAN WHO PLANTED MILLIONS OF TREES
by Franck Prévot; illus. by Aurélia Fronty
Charlesbridge
VOICE OF FREEDOM: FANNIE LOU HAMER: THE SPIRIT OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
by Carol Boston Weatherford; Illus. by Ekua Holmes
Candlewick

I Lived on Butterfly Hill
by Marjorie Agosín
Trans. by E.M. O'Connor; illus. by Lee White
Simon & Schuster/Atheneum
El Deafo
by Cece Bell
Harry N. Abrams
Strike!: The Farm Workers Fight for Their Rights
by Larry Dane Brimner
Boyds Mills/Calkins Creek
Caminar
by Skila Brown
Candlewick
Silver People: Voices from the Panama Canal
by Margarita Engle
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Angel Island: Gateway to Gold Mountain
by Russell Freedman
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Clarion
Grandfather Gandhi
by Arun Gandhi and Bethany Hegedus
Illus. by Evan Turk
Simon & Schuster/Atheneum
Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out
by Susan Kuklin
Candlewick
Harlem Hellfighters
by J. Patrick Lewis
Illus. by Gary Kelley
Creative Editions
Voices from the March on Washington
by J. Patrick Lewis & George Ella Lyon
Boyds Mills/WordSong
How It Went Down
by Kekla Magoon
Henry Holt
Migrant
by José Manuel Mateo
Illus. by Javier Martínez Pedro
Harry N. Abrams
The Turtle of Oman
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Harper Collins/Greenwillow
The Red Pencil
by Andrea Davis Pinkney
Illus. by Shane W. Evans
Little, Brown
This Day in June
by Gayle E. Pittman
Illus. by Kristyna Litten
APA/Magination
Little Melba and Her Big Trombone
by Katheryn Russell-Brown
Illus. by Frank Morrison
Lee & Low
Separate Is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez & her family's fight for desegregation
by Duncan Tonatiuh
Harry N. Abrams
House of Purple Cedar
by Tim Tingle
Cinco Puntos
Hana Hashimoto, Sixth Violin
by Chieri Uegaki
Illus. by Qin Leng
Kids Can Press
A Time to Dance
by Padma Venkatraman
Penguin/Nancy Paulsen
Like Water ON Stone
by Dana Walrath
Random House/Delacorte
Brown Girl Dreaming
by Jacqueline Woodson
Penguin/Nancy Paulsen
Arcady's Goal
by Eugene Yelchin
Henry Holt
Twenty-two Cents: Muhammad Yunus and the Village Bank
by Paula Yoo
Illus. by Jamel Akib
Lee & Low

Fiction: Realistic & Fantasy
If I Ever Get Out of Here
by Gansworth Eric
Scholastic/Arthur A. Levine Books

The Vine Basket
by La Valley Josanne
Houghton Mif[lin Harcourt/Clarion Books

The Language Inside
by Thompson Holly
Random House/Delacorte

The Servant
by Sharafeddine Fatima
House of Anansi Press/Groundwood Books

The Milk of Birds
by Whitman Sylvia
Simon & Schuster/Atheneum

Historical Fiction
The Lightning Dreamer
by Engle Margarita
Houghton Mif[lin Harcourt/Harcourt

Salt: A Story of Friendship in a Time of War
by Frost Helen
Farrar Straus Giroux/Frances Foster Books

Nonfiction
Looks Like Daylight: Voices of Indigenous Kids
by Ellis Deborah
House of Anansi Press/Groundwood

Legends, Icons & Rebels: Music that Changed the World
by Robertson Robbie, Guerinot Jim, Robertson Sebastian, and Levine Jared
Tundra Books

Diego Rivera: An Artist for the People
by Rubin Susan Goldman
Abrams

Courage Has No Color: The True Story of the Triple Nickles, America's First Black Paratroopers
by Stone Tanya Lee
Candlewick Press

Why Do We Fight? ConWlict, War, and Peace
by Walker Niki
Owlkids

When the Beat Was Born: DJ Kool Herc and the Creation of Hip Hop
by Hill Laban Carrick
Illus. Theodore Taylor III.
Roaring Brook

Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote: A Migrant's Tale
by Tonatiuh Duncan
Abrams

When Thunder Comes: Poems for Civil Rights Leaders
by Lewis J. Patrick
Illus. Jim Burke, R. Gregory Christie, Tonya Engel, John Parra, and Meilo So.
Chronicle Books

Graphic Novels
A game for swallows: To die, to leave, to return
by Zeina Abirached
Trans. Edward Gauvin
Minneapolis, MN: Lerner Publishing Group

Darkroom: A memoir in black and white
by Lila Quintero Weaver
Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press

Fiction: Realistic & Fantasy
My book of life by Angel
by Martine Leavitt
New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux/MacMillan

Starry river of the sky
by Grace Lin
New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company

Red thread sisters
by Carol Antoinette Peacock
New York, NY: Viking/Penguin Young Readers

Historical Fiction
The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano
by Sonia Manzano
New York, NY: Scholastic

No crystal stair: A documentary novel of the life and work of Lewis Michaux, Harlem bookseller
by Vaunda Michaux Nelson
Illus. by Christie R. Gregory
Minneapolis: Carolrhoda Lab/Lerner

Shadow on the mountain: A novel inspired by the true adventures of a wartime spy
by Margi Preus
New York, NY: Amulet

The lynching of Louie Sam
by Elizabeth Stewart
Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Annick Press

Hope and tears: Ellis Island voices
by Gwenyth Swain
Honesdale, PA: Calkins Creek/Boyds Mills Press

Nonfiction
Kids of Kabul: Living bravely through a never-ending war
by Deborah Ellis
Toronto: Groundwood

We've got a job: The 1963 Birmingham children's march
by Cynthia Levinson
Atlanta, GA: Peachtree Publishers

Hand in hand: Ten black men who changed America
by Andrea Davis Pinkney
New York, NY: Jump at the Sun Books/Disney

That mad game. Growing up in a war zone: An anthology of essays from around the globe
by J.L.Powers (Ed.)
El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos Press

Picturebooks
Ganesha's sweet tooth
by Sanjay Patel and Emily Haynes
Illus. by Sanjay Patel
San Francisco, CA: Chronicle

The stamp collector
by Jennifer Lanthier
Illus. by François Thisdale
Toronto, ON: Fitzhenry & Whiteside

Hands around the library: Protecting Egypt's treasured books
by Susan L. Roth and Karen Leggett Abouraya
Illus. by Susan L. Roth
New York, NY: Dial/The Penguin Group

Monsieur Marceau
by Linda Schubert
Illus. by Gerard Dubois
New York, NY: Roaring Brook Press/MacMillan

I lay my stitches down: Poems of American slavery
by Cynthia Grady
Illus. by Michele Wood
Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Books for Young Readers
​

While You Are Sleeping
Author & Illustrator: Durga Burnhard
Charlesbridge

Alicia Alonso: Prima Ballerina
Author: Carmine T. Bernier-Grand
Illustrator: Raul Colon
Marshall Cavendish

Five Thousand Years of Slavery
Author: Marjorie Gann and Janet Willen
Tundra

Beyond Bullets: A Photo Journal of Afghanistan
Author: Rafal Gerszak with Dawn Hunter
Annick Press

Peaceful Pieces: Poems and Quilts about Peace
Author: Anna Grossnickle Hines
Henry Holt

Which Side Are You On?
Author: George Ella Lyon
Illustrator: Christopher Cardinale
Cinco Puntos Press

The Mangrove Tree: Planting Trees to Feed Families
Author: Susan L. Roth & Cindy Trumbore
Illustrator: Susan L. Roth
Lee and Low

PICTURE BOOKS
Saltypie; A Choctaw journey from darkness into light
by Tim Tingle.
Illus. by Karen Clarkson.
Cinco Puntos Press

Seeds of Change: planting a path to peace
by Jen Cullerton Johnson
Lee and Low Books

Black Jack; the ballad of Jack Johnson
by Charles R. Smith, Jr.
Illus. by Shane W. Evans,
Roaring Brook Press

Fiction
8th Grade Super Zero
by Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich.
Arthur A. Levine Books

Heart of a Samurai; based on the true story of Nakahama Manjiro.
by Margi Preus.
Amulet Books

Lost Boy, Lost Girl; escaping civil war in Sudan
by John Bul Dau.
National Geographic

They Called Themselves the KKK
by Susan Campbell Bartoletti.
Houghton Mifflin

Sugar Changed the World
by Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos.
Clarion Books

PICTURE BOOKS
14 Cows for America.
Carmen Agra Deedy in collaboration with Wilson Kimeli Naiyomah.
Illustrated by Thomas Gonzalez.
Atlanta: Peachtree

NON-FICTION
After Gandhi; one hundred years of nonviolent resistance.
Anne Sibley O'Brien and Perry Edmond O'Brien
Charlesbridge

Cycle of Rice, Cycle of Life; a story of sustainable farming.
Jan Reynolds
NY: Lee & Low

Denied, Detained Deported; the dark side of American immigration.
Ann Bausum.
National Geographic

Every Human Has Rights. A Photographic Declaration for Kids.
National Geographic

Truce; the day the soldiers stopped fighting.
Jim Murphy
NY: Scholastic

Bad News for Outlaws; the remarkable life of Bass Reeves, Deputy U.S. Marshal.
Vaunda Micheaux Nelson.
Illus. by R. Gregory Christie
Minneapolis: Carolghoda

Claudette Colvin; twice toward justice.
Phillip Hoose
NY: Melanie Kroupa ​

Poetry
Alarcon, Francisco X. (2008).
Animal poems of the Iguazu/Animalario del Iguazu.
Illustrated by Maya Christina Gonzalez.
San Francisco, CA: Children's Book Press.

Greenberg, Jan. (2008).
Side by side: New poems inspired by art from around the world.
New York: Abrams.

Bartoletti, Susan Campbell. (2008).
The boy who dared.
New York: Scholastic.

Realistic Fiction
Carter, Anne Laurel. (2008).
The shepherd's granddaughter.
Toronto: Groundwood Books.

Zenatti, Valerie. (2008).
A bottle in the Gaza Sea.
New York: Bloomsbury Children's Books.

Picturebooks

Fox, Mem. (2008).
Ten little fingers and ten little toes.
Illustrated by Helen Oxenbury.
New York: Harcourt.

Nonfiction (Includes Biography)
Bellward, Stacy. (2008).
Ethiopian voices: Tsion's life.
Photographs by Erlend Berge.
Brooklyn Park, MN: Amharic Kids.

Bolden, Tonya. (2008).
George Washington Carver.
Published in association with the Field Museum, Chicago. New York: Abrams.

D'Aluisio, Faith. (2008).
What the World Eats.
Photographs by Peter Menzel.
Berkeley, CA: Tricycle Press.

Kuklin, Susan. (2008).
No choirboy: Murder, violence, and teenagers on death row.
New York: Henry Holt.
Milway, Katie Smith (2008).

One hen: How one small loan made a big difference.
Illustrated by Eugenie Fernandes.
Toronto, ON: Kids Can Press.

Nelson, Kadir. (2008).
We are the ship: The story of Negro League baseball.
New York: Jump- at-the-Sun/Hyperion Books for Children.

Nivola, Claire A. (2008).
Planting the trees of Kenya: The story of Wangari Maathai.
New York: Frances Foster/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ​

​Alexie, Sherman.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
Art by Ellen Forney.
Boston: Little, Brown Young Readers, 2007.

Beah, Ishmael.
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier.
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007.

Compestine, Ying Chang.
Revolution is Not a Dinner Party.
New York: Henry Holt, 2007.

Fleischman, Paul.
Glass Slipper, Gold Sandal: A Worldwide Cinderella.
Illustrated by Julie Paschkis.
New York: Henry Holt, 2007.

Sis, Peter.
The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain.
New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2007.

Stanton, Karen.
Papi's Gift.
Illustrated by Rene King Moreno.
Honesdale, PA: Boyds Mills Press, 2007.

Strauss, Rochelle.
One Well: The Story of Water on Earth.
Illustrated by Rosemary Woods.
Toronto, ON: Kids Can Press, 2007.

Thompson, Lauren.
Ballerina Dreams: A True Story.
Photographs by James Estrin.
New York: Holtzbrink, 2007.

Williams, Karen Lynn & Mohammed, Khadra.
Four Feet, Two Sandals.
Illustrated by Doug Chayka.
Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007.

Wise, Bill.
Louis Sockalexis: Native American Baseball Pioneer.
Illustrated by Bill Farnsworth.
New York: Lee & Low, 2007.

Boyne, John.
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.
New York: David Fickling, 2006.

Campoy, F. Isabel. & Ada, Alma F.
Tales Our Abuelitas Told: A Hispanic Folktale Collection.
Illustrated by Felipe Davalos, Viva Escriva, Susan Guevara, Leyla Torres.
New York: Atheneum, 2006.

Diakite, Penda.
I Lost My Tooth in Africa.
Illustrated by Bab Wague Diakite.
New York: Scholastic, 2006.

Draper, Sharon. Copper Sun. New York: Atheneum, 2006.

Freedman, Russell.
Freedom Walkers: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
New York: Holiday House, 2006.

Greenfield, Eloise.
When the Horses Ride By.
Illustrated by Jan Spivey Gilchrist.
New York: Lee & Low, 2006.

Hopkinson, Deborah.
Up Before Daybreak: Cotton and People in America.
New York: Scholastic, 2006.

Kessler, Cristina.
Best Beekeeper of Lalibela: A Tale from Africa.
Illustrated by Leonard Jenkins.
New York: Holiday House, 2006.

Lee-Tai, Amy.
A Place Where Sunflowers Grow.
Illustrated by Felicia Hoshino.
San Francisco, CA: Children's Book Press, 2006.

McCutcheon, John.
Christmas in the Trenches.
Illustrated by Henri Sorensen.
Atlanta, GA: Peachtree, 2006.

McKissack, Patricia.
Porch Lies: Tales of Slicksters, Tricksters, and Other Wily Characters.
Illustrated by Andre Carrilho.
New York: Schwartz & Wade, 2006.

Rubin, Susan Goldman. with Ela Weissberger.
The Cat with the Yellow Star: Coming of Age in Terezin.
New York: Holiday House, 2006.

Shoveller, Herb.
Ryan and Jimmy and the Well in Africa That Brought Them Together.
Tonawanda, NY: Kids Can Press, 2006.

Tingle, Tom.
Crossing Bok Chitto: A Choctaw Tale of Friendship and Freedom.
Illustrated by Jeanne Rorex Bridges.
El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos Press, 2006.

Weatherford, Carol Boston.
Dear Mr. Rosenwald.
Illustrated by Gregory R. Christie.
New York: Scholastic, 2006.

Weatherford, Carol Boston.
Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom.
Illustrated by Kadir Nelson.
New York: Jump at the Sun, 2006.

Ahmadi, Farah.
The story of my life: An Afghan girl on the other side of the sky.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005.

Bartoletti, Susan Campbell.
Hitler youth: Growing up in Hitler's shadow.
New York: Scholastic, 2005.

Carling, Amelia Lau.
Sawdust carpets.
Toronto: Groundwood/Douglas & McIntyre, 2005.

Chamberlin, Mary and Chamberlin, Rich.
Mama Panya's pancakes: A village tale from Kenya.
Illustrated by Julia Cairns.
Cambridge, MA: Barefoot Books, 2005.

Hillman, Laura.
I will plant you a lilac tree: A Memoir of a Schindler's list survivor.
New York: Atheneum, 2005.

Johnson-Davis, Denys.
Goha the wise fool.
Illustrated by Hag Handy and Hany.
New York: Philomel, 2005.

Jurmain, Suzanne.
The forbidden schoolhouse: The true and dramatic story of Prudence Crandall and her students.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.

Krinitz, Esther Nisenthal and Steinhardt, Bernice.
Memories of survival.
New York: Hyperion, 2005.

Nelson, Marilyn.
A wreath for Emmett Till.
Illustrated by Philippe Lardy.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.

Rappaport, Doreen.
The school is not white! A true story of the Civil Rights Movement.
Illustrated by Curtis James.
New York: Hyperion, 2005.

Reich, Susanna.
José!: Born to dance: The story of José Limon.
Illustrated by Raul Colón.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005.

Ruurs, Martriet.
My librarian is a camel: How books are brought to children around the world.
Honsdale, PA: Boyds Mills Press, 2005.

Staples, Suzanne Fisher.
Under the persimmon tree.
New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2005.

Weatherford, Carole Boston.
A Negro league scrapbook.
Honesdale, PA: Boyds Mills Press, 2005.

Williams, Mary.
Brothers in hope: The story of the lost boys of Sudan.
Illustrated by R. Gregory Christie.
New York: Lee & Low Books, 2005.

Yoo, Paula.
Sixteen years in sixteen seconds.
Illustrated by Don Lee.
New York: Lee & Low Books, 2005. ​

MacDonald, Margaret Read.
Three minute tales: Stories from around the world to tell or read when time is short.
August House, 2004.

Myers, Walter Dean.
Here in Harlem: Poems in many voices.
Holiday House, 2004.

Picture Books (Realistic Fiction)
Kyuchukov, Hristo.
My name was Hussein.
Illustrated by Allan Eitzen.
Boyds Mills, 2004.

Raven, Margot Theis.
Circle unbroken.
Illustrated by E. B. Lewis.
Melanie Kroupa/Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2004.

Picture Books (Historical Fiction)
Hall, Bruce Edward.
Henry and the kite dragon.
Illustrated by William Low.
Philomel/Penguin Young Readers Group, 2004.

Woodson, Jacqueline.
Coming on home soon.
Illustrated by E. B. Lewis.
Putnam/Penguin Young Readers Group, 2004.

Realistic Fiction

Kessler, Cristina.
Our secret, Siri Aang.
Philomel/Penguin Young Readers Group, 2004.

Singer, Marilyn (Ed.).
Face relations: 11 stories about seeing beyond color.
Simon & Schuster, 2004.

Historical Fiction
Chotjewitz, David.
Daniel half human and the good Nazi.
Trans. by Doris Orgel.
Richard Jackson/Atheneum/ Simon & Schuster, 2004.

Nonfiction: Informational Books & Biographies
Freedman, Russell.
The voice that challenged a nation: Marian Anderson and the struggle for equal rights.
Clarion, 2004.

Hill, Laban Carrick.
Harlem stomp!: A cultural history of the Harlem Renaissance.
Megan Tingley/Little, Brown, 2004.

Turner, Pamela S.
Hachiko: The true story of a loyal dog.
Illus. by Yan Nascimbene.
Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

Warren, Andrea.
Escape from Saigon: How a Vietnam War orphan became an American boy.
Melanie Koupa/Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2004.

Weber, Ednah New Rider.
Rattlesnake Mesa: Stories from a Native American childhood.
Photos. by Richela Renkun.
Lee & Low Books, 2004

Cave, K. (2003).
One child, one seed: A South African counting book.
Illustrated by Gisèle Wulfsohn.
New York: Henry Holt.

Dennis, Y. W., & Hirschfelder, A. (2003).
Children of Native America today.
Watertown, MA: Charlesbridge Publishers.

Edwardson, D. D. (2003).
Whale snow.
Illustrated by Annie Patterson.
Watertown, MA: Talewinds/Charlesbridge.

Fleming, C. (2003).
Boxes for Katje.
Illustrated by Stacey Dressen-McQueen.
NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Krull, K. (2003).
Harvesting Hope: The Story of Cesar Chavez.
Illustrated by Yuyi Morales.
New York: Harcourt.

Jung, R, (1996 published in German /2003 published in English).
Dreaming in black & white.
Translated by Anthea Bell.
New York: Phyllis Fogelman Books.

Mankell, H. (2003).
Secrets in the fire.
Translated by Anne Connie Struksrud.
Buffalo, NY: Annick Press.

Morales, Y. (2003).
Just a minute: A trickster tale and counting book.
San Francisco: Chronicle Books.

Morpurgo, M. (1999 published in Great Britain; 2003 published in U.S.)
Kensuke's kingdom.
New York: Scholastic Press.

Naidoo, B.
Out of bounds: Seven stories of conflict and hope.
New York: HarperCollins.

Philip, N. (2003).
Horses hooves and chicken feet: Mexican folktales.
Illustrated by Jacqueline Mair.
New York: Clarion Books.

Sacre, A. (2003).
The barking mouse.
Illustrated by Alfredo Aguirre. Morton Grove, IL: Albert Whitman & Co.

Shea, P. D., & Weill, C. (2003).
Ten mice for Tet.
Illustrated by To Ngox Trang.
Embroidery by Pham Viet Dinh.
San Francisco: Chronicle Books.

Smothers, E. F. (2003).
The hard-times jar.
Illustrated by John Holyfield.
New York: Frances Foster Books/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Tingle, T. (2003).
Walking the Choctaw Road: Stories from Red People Memory.
El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos Press.

Tryszynska, L. as told to Michelle R. McCann. (2003).
Luba: Angel of Bergen-Belsen.
Illustrated by Ann Marshall.
Berkeley CA: Tricycle Press.
​

Bial, R. (2002).
Tenement: Immigrant life on the lower east side.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Crowe, C. (2002).
Mississippi trial, 1955.
New York: Phyllis Fogelman/Penguin Putnam.

Freedman, R. (2002).
Confucius: The golden rule.
Illustrated by Frederic Clement.
New York: Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic.

Hoffman, M. (2002).
The color of home.
Illustrated by Karin Littlewood.
New York: Phyllis Fogelman Putnam.

Nye, N. S. (2002).
19 varieties of gazelle: Poems of the Middle East.
New York: Greenwillow.

Orozco, J. L. (2002).
Fiestas: A year of Latin American songs and celebration.
Illustrated by Elisa Kleven.
New York: Dutton.

Park, F., & Park, G. (2002).
Good-bye, 382 Shin Dang Dong.
Illustrated by Yangsook Choi.
Washington, DC: National Geographic.

UNICEF. (2002).
A life like mine: How children live around the world.
New York: DK Publishing.

Wong, J. S. (2002).
Apple pie 4th of July.
Illustrated by Margaret Chodos-Irvine.
San Diego, CA: Harcourt.

Chen, D. (2001).
China's son: Growing up in the Cultural Revolution.
New York: Delacorte Press.

Cooper, M. L. (2001).
Slave spirituals and the Jubilee Singers.
New York: Clarion Books.

Garland, S. (2001).
Children of the dragon: Selected tales from Vietnam.
Illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman.
San Diego, CA: Harcourt.

Hoyt-Goldsmith, D. (2001).
Celebrating Ramadan.
Photographs by Lawrence Migdale.
New York: Holiday House.

Johnston, T. (2001).
Any small goodness: A novel of the barrio.
Illustrated by Raúl Colón.
New York: Blue Sky/Scholastic.

Johnston, T. (2001).
Uncle rain cloud.
Illustrated by.Fabricio VandenBroeck.
Watertown, MA: Charlesbridge.

Lipp, F. (2001).
The caged birds of Phnom Penh.
Illustrated by Ronald Himler.
New York: Holiday House.

Mckissack, P. C. (2001).
Goin' someplace special.
Illustrated by Jerry Pinkney.
New York City: Atheneum.

Tunnell, M. O. (2001).
Brothers in valor: A story of resistance.
New York: Holiday House.

Deedy, C. A. (2000).
The yellow star: The legend of King Christian X of Denmark.
Illustrated by Henri Sørensen.
Atlanta: Peachtree Publications.

Gold, A. L. (2000).
A special fate : Chiume Sugihara, hero of the Holocaust.
New York: Scholastic Books.

Govenar, A, (Ed.). (2000).
Osceola: Memories of a sharecropper's daughter.
Illustrated by Shane W. Evans.
New York: Hyperion.

Herrera, J. F. (2000).
The upside down boy, El niño de cabeza.
llustrated by Elizabeth Gomez.
San Francisco: Children's Book Press.

Herschler, M. B. (2000).
The darkest corner.
Asheville, North Carolina: Front Street.

Rubin, S. G. (2000).
Fireflies in the dark: The story of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and the children of Terezin.
New York: Holiday House.

Hamanaka, S., & Ayano O. (1999).
In search of the spirit: The living national treasures of Japan.
Illustrated by Sheila Hamanaka.
Calligraphy by Ayano Ohmi.
New York: Morrow Junior Books.

Harrell, B. O. (1999).
Longwalker's journey: A novel of the Choctaw Trail of Tears.
New York: Dial.

Hopkinson, D. (1999).
A band of angels: A story inspired by the Jubilee Singers.
Illustrated by Raúl Colón.
New York: Atheneum.

Left Hand Bull, J., & Haldane, S. (1999).
Lakota hoop dancer.
Photographs by Suzanne Haldane.
New York: Dutton.

Myers, W. D. (1999).
At her majesty's request: An African princess in Victorian England.
New York: Scholastic.

Silverman, E. (1999).
Raisel's riddle.
Illustrated by Susan Gaber.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Wells, R. (1999).
Streets of gold.
Illustrated by Dan Andreasen.
New York: Dial Books for Young Readers.

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With the Fire on High By Elizabeth AcevedoHarper Collins/Harper Teen The Undefeated By Kwame Alexander Illus. by Kadir NelsonHoughton Mifflin Harcourt Orange for the Sunsets By Tina AthaideHarper Collins/Katherine Tegen Books Feed Your Mind: A Story of August Wilson By Jen Bryant Illus.

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Outstanding Science Trade Books for Students

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Outstanding Science Trade Books for Students

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Outstanding Science Trade Books for Students K–12

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NSTA, in conjunction with the Children’s Book Council, is pleased to announce the list of Outstanding Science Trade Books for Students. Representing the best science trade books published in 2025 for students in kindergarten through 12th grade, the books featured on the list include captivating stories, compelling characters, and beautiful illustrations.

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Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction

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Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction

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Orbis Pictus Award (Nonfiction for Children)

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In an exquisitely executed and lyrical dual text, Larson parallels the birth of a star with the growing curiosity and discoveries of scientist Cecilia Payne. Painterly depictions of star development complement the more loosely drawn scenes of Payne's life. Rich back matter provides even more information.

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A 501(c)(3) nonprofit, WNDB aims to create a world where every reader can find themselves in the pages of a book. To reach this goal, we've created programs to mentor diverse writers and illustrators, support diverse publishing professionals, and provide books to classrooms nationwide.

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"Start with a Book has done the work for you. As a busy parent, I've come to realize that this is my one-stop shop for book ideas and other learning resources when my kids ask me questions about music, dinosaurs, buildings ... and the list goes on."

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Start with a Book | Explore great children's books and activities in science, social studies, arts and literature

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"Start with a Book has done the work for you. As a busy parent, I've come to realize that this is my one-stop shop for book ideas and other learning resources when my kids ask me questions about music, dinosaurs, buildings ... and the list goes on."

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Welcome!! We've created this page to serve as a resource for PreK-12 teachers and librarians hoping to learn more about teaching with diverse, high quality books for children, tweens, and teens.

By using the drop-down menu at the top of the page, you can:

find out about our professional books for teachers

watch webinars, listen to podcasts, and read articles

follow The Classroom Bookshelf Blog for which we are co-editors and writers, and The Biography Clearinghouse , of which we are both founding members and contributors

learn even more about trade books by scrolling through vetted resources on diverse books for children, tweens, and teens

explore a range of digital resources to help you build your own text sets

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Rolling Knowledge & Vocabulary Tracker Template

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Rolling Knowledge & Vocabulary Tracker Template

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EXAMPLE

Achieve the Core

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Rolling Knowledge and Vocabulary Journal Template.docx

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It is February 2015, and I am at a national conference listening to a panel present the results of their research on improving reading comprehension. Several members of the panel, like myself and a few others in the room, are funded by the Institute of Education Sciences as part of the Reading for Understanding Initiative. This $120 million program supported six interconnected research teams in their efforts to improve reading achievement in the United States. ¹ Educators and policymakers had for some time been concerned about the performance of American children on tests of reading achievement. Over the last 20 years, only about a third of students have scored at the proficient level on the reading subtest of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). ² This assessment is administered biennially to a representative sample of fourth- and eighth-grade students (and every four years to 12th-graders) from across the nation. Somewhat better, though still troubling, levels of performance have also been reported on state-based reading tests, administered annually starting in third grade. The Reading for Understanding Initiative was intended to jump-start instruction in reading comprehension and significantly improve reading achievement on state and national assessments. In fact, it was described by program officials as the "moonshot" for reading comprehension.

Unfortunately, the preliminary results that the panel presented fell short of these expectations. The reported studies found that students receiving a variety of comprehension interventions made gains, compared with control groups, on assessments closely tied to the interventions-but they showed limited or no significant gains on standardized measures of reading comprehension. Needless to say, conference attendees were surprised and discouraged by these results.

Sitting in the back of the room, I clearly remember not being particularly alarmed by what the panel reported. As part of my work on the Reading for Understanding Initiative and earlier related projects, I had spent many hours thinking, studying, and talking with teachers and colleagues about reading comprehension. Through these efforts, I had come to recognize that the field's general approach to reading comprehension was shortsighted. We were treating reading comprehension as if it were a single construct that could be measured with one or more general reading tests and improved with a short-term intervention. At a deeper conceptual level, most researchers (including those funded by the Reading for Understanding Initiative) recognized that reading comprehension was multidimensional, but it had been common practice in education and research for some time to study, assess, and provide instruction as if comprehension were a skill, rather like swimming. If we teach someone to swim, they can soon transfer that skill to any body of water, whether it be a pool, lake, or ocean. But reading comprehension is not a skill someone learns and can then apply in different reading contexts. It is one of the most complex activities that we engage in on a regular basis, and our ability to comprehend is dependent upon a wide range of knowledge and skills.

The Comprehension as Skill Myth

How have we come to think of comprehension as a skill? I believe a major reason this has occurred is because we have talked and written about comprehension in the context of related skill-like abilities. Discussions about reading often include the topics of phonics, fluency, and related skills, such as phonemic awareness, together with comprehension. As an example, take the work of the National Reading Panel. ³ This panel of reading experts was convened by Congress to assess the effectiveness of different approaches to teaching reading. They examined a wide range of instructional approaches related to comprehension, but in overviews of their work, comprehension has been reduced to one of the "Big Five," along with phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, and vocabulary. As such, it is depicted alongside these skills as one of the "pillars" of reading. In another common graphic, the word comprehension is displayed within a box similar in design (actually smaller) to boxes for other skill-like components of reading. Whereas such a consideration and depiction are thought to form a useful heuristic, it can give the false impression that comprehension is comparable to these skills in terms of its complexity and the way it is best taught and measured.

Furthermore, widely used approaches to teaching reading comprehension reinforce this view. ⁴ Comprehension has typically been taught through the use of strategies such as "find the main idea," "make a prediction," or "monitor your comprehension." These strategies are taught and practiced in order to gain automaticity, much like what is done with other skill-like behaviors. This, in turn, can lead us to believe that comprehension can be thought of in a similar manner to these other skills.

A More Accurate and Complex Model

Despite this common view about comprehension, several lines of enquiry have recognized the true complexity of reading comprehension for some time. Nearly 20 years ago, this complexity was captured by the RAND Reading Study Group. ⁵ This federally funded group was charged with developing a research agenda to address pressing issues in literacy. As part of their 2002 report, they conceptualized reading comprehension as a combination of factors within three different categories: the reader, the text, and the activity of reading.

The reader brings a set of cognitive abilities (such as attention, memory, and reasoning), language knowledge and skills, motivations and interests, and background knowledge to the task of reading. Readers vary considerably in these factors, and this variability impacts their comprehension. Considerable research attention has been focused on reader variables, and their impact on comprehension is well documented.

The text includes such elements as genre, topic, and complexity. Students encounter texts with different genres-such as narrative, descriptive, expository, or persuasive-and these texts vary in their subject matter and level of complexity. Although not emphasized in the RAND report from 2002, texts also now vary in their form. They may be in a paper or digital form, and the latter can be displayed on a variety of devices, such as a phone, tablet, or computer. Each of these forms imposes its own set of constraints and challenges on comprehension. The notion of multiple texts can also be added to this category to account for the fact that skilled readers often rely on more than one text for comprehension.

The activity refers to the task or purpose of reading. It is often argued that the purpose of reading is comprehension. But we actually seek to comprehend for a specific reason, be it to prepare for a test, evaluate the strengths of an argument, learn the rules of a game, or enjoy a magazine article or book. Each purpose brings unique knowledge and skills that must be acquired to be successful.

Importantly, the RAND Reading Study Group viewed these various elements interacting within a sociocultural context that involves factors such as where the reading occurs (e.g., school or home), how much support there is (e.g., individual, teacher- or caregiver-led, or group activity), and what cultural value is placed on reading by students' families, peers, racial and ethnic groups, and other groups that are central to the students' identities.

Taken together, it is easy to see how any one individual may have multiple levels of comprehension ability depending upon what they are reading and why they are reading it. As a result, comprehension cannot be reduced to a single notion because it is not a single ability.

The Role of Knowledge

Chief among the factors influencing reading comprehension is background knowledge. Research clearly shows that how much readers understand about the text's topic before they read it is a major factor in how much they understand while and after they read it. ⁶ Unfortunately, much of the efforts directed toward improving reading comprehension have neglected building background knowledge. (As discussed later, there are widely used strategies for "activating" background knowledge, but they do not necessarily develop new knowledge.) It was this neglect that first alerted me to the problems with the way we were thinking about reading comprehension.

In my graduate training, many years ago, I was introduced to the role of knowledge in reading comprehension. At that time, schema theory was a popular topic in research on human cognition and learning. A schema is an organized unit of knowledge that forms the foundation for many activities involving human thought. Richard Anderson, a professor of educational psychology, brought the notion of a schema to education and argued for its critical role in reading comprehension as well as learning in general. ⁷ He was among the first to convey to me the importance of teaching knowledge to improve comprehension.

In my psychology classes, I was introduced to a study that continues to be one of my favorites. The following passage, which was designed to be ambiguous, was read aloud to college students, and they were asked to recall as much as they could.

The procedure is actually quite simple. First you arrange things into different groups. Of course, one pile may be sufficient depending on how much there is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities that is the next step, otherwise you are pretty well set. It is important not to overdo things. That is, it is better to do too few things at once than too many. In the short run this may not seem important but complications can easily arise. A mistake can be expensive as well. At first the whole procedure will seem complicated. Soon, however, it will become just another facet of life. It is difficult to foresee any end to the necessity for this task in the immediate future, but then one never can tell. After the procedure is completed one arranges the materials into different groups again. Then they can be put into their appropriate places. Eventually they will be used once more and the whole cycle will then have to be repeated. However, that is part of life. ⁸

Students given the topic of the passage beforehand quickly made sense of what they heard and recalled many details. (Those students were told, "The paragraph you will hear will be about washing clothes.") But those who heard the same passage without the topic were confused and recalled little. Of particular interest, a third group of students was given the topic after they heard the passage, but they too were confused and recalled little. Of course, it was not simply the topic but rather the knowledge associated with it that allowed the students to make sense of what they had heard-but only if this knowledge was available from the start.

It was studies like this, including similar ones involving reading rather than listening, that early on clearly demonstrated for me the importance of knowledge for comprehension. But somewhere along the line, educators and researchers-myself included-got distracted and failed to pay attention to its importance. It is not exactly clear how this happened. Perhaps it was a shift in focus to bottom-up models of reading that argued that meaning was contained within the text and that the reader's job was to extract it. Or maybe it was just that knowledge took too much time to teach, and it made more sense to focus on skills that could be taught quickly and applied across topics. Also, considering comprehension alongside skill-like aspects of reading probably distracted us from the role of knowledge.

But whatever the reason, knowledge has come back to the forefront in discussions of reading comprehension. Proponents such as E. D. Hirsch Jr., Daniel T. Willingham, and Natalie Wexler have written extensively about the role of knowledge in comprehension.* Their work and that of others ⁹ has begun to have an influence on research in reading comprehension, but change has been slow. Some of the projects in the Reading for Understanding Initiative did have knowledge as a central component, but the other projects paid only limited attention to knowledge in instruction and/or assessment. Limited attention also plagued other large-scale projects, such as those within the Striving Readers program. This program funded by the US Department of Education involved a set of 17 studies designed to improve reading comprehension in middle and high school students. ¹⁰ While materials did address different topics, there was no direct effort to build knowledge as part of the intervention or assessment. Again, it is not surprising that these studies only demonstrated small effects at best on improving reading comprehension.

What Knowledge Does for Comprehension

Why is knowledge so critical for comprehension? To begin with, it provides a framework for organizing incoming information and guides us as we read through a text. We better understand what the topic is and have expectations about where a passage may be going. By doing so, knowledge keeps us on track and prevents us from going down "blind alleys" in our understanding. This framework also gives us a place to anchor new information in memory and associate it with past knowledge. We use these building blocks of the new and the old to construct an initial understanding of what we are reading and then continuously revise and add to it as we move through a text. It is this integration of the new information in the text with what we already know that brings meaning to what we read.

Background knowledge also allows us to make inferences and fill in information that is not explicitly provided. Authors rarely tell us all we need to know in order to understand a text, so we need to fill in some of the details with our background knowledge. Knowledge also enables us to more easily recognize which of the multiple meanings of a word is appropriate for the context. For example, when reading a passage about baseball, knowing that the word pitcher refers to a person rather than an object could be critical for comprehension.

Knowledge is also essential for thinking. But in certain contexts these days, it is seen as secondary to thinking. Critical thinking has become the rage in education. All too often, teachers are urged to engage students in thinking deeply and critically about what they read as if these skills were independent of the topic; meanwhile, background knowledge is downplayed as if the specific information about a topic could be looked up on the internet when necessary. ¹¹ But it is the specific information that gives students something to think critically about-and our minds are surprisingly limited in how much new information they can take in at one time. Knowledge must accumulate over time to ensure a level of depth that allows for a critical analysis of the subject matter. We can't think logically about different approaches to government without knowing a lot about different forms of government. So, in this sense, knowledge is the most critical component of critical thinking.

Knowledge also allows us to make the most use of our working memory, where much of thinking takes place. There are limitations on how much information we can hold and think about simultaneously in working memory, and this amount is heavily influenced by knowledge. Knowledge coming from long-term memory places a much smaller burden on working memory than new knowledge coming from a text (or a speaker); it also leaves us with more capacity in working memory to think about things in novel ways. As a simple example, it is easier to remember the letter sequences USA, FBI, and NBC than PDQ, RJB, and FVO. When reading, the more information related to the topic we already have stored in long-term memory, the more deeply we can think about that topic-even as we read a passage that offers new information.

Finally, the relationship between knowledge and reading comprehension is reciprocal in nature. Not only does knowledge improve comprehension, but comprehension allows the reader to build new knowledge. Creating a coherent understanding of what one reads modifies the background knowledge that is available for subsequent reading comprehension either later in the same text or in future reading of related texts. ¹²

Implications for Instruction

It should be evident from my comments that improving reading comprehension is a complex process that requires multiple levels of instruction and practice. Clearly, building background knowledge that is both deep and broad is needed to lay the foundation for comprehension and for further knowledge acquisition. However, students also need high-quality reading instruction involving decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension strategies in order to best use their knowledge in different reading contexts and for different purposes.

For many years, the primary way knowledge has been addressed in the context of reading has been through activating background knowledge using strategies like prereading discussions, concept maps, and anticipation guides. These strategies can be effective-but they only work when the appropriate knowledge is available. Often, children will not have the requisite knowledge, or their knowledge will be impoverished or inaccurate. If inaccurate, this activation can actually be detrimental to comprehension.

Whereas knowledge activation has been widely viewed as a component of reading instruction, building knowledge often has not. In fact, instruction devoted to content knowledge has actually been replaced by other aspects of reading instruction. In most elementary schools, social studies and science instruction has been supplanted by English language arts (ELA) instruction. Surveys have shown that, on average, children in grades 1-4 receive only 2.3 hours of science instruction per week, whereas four times that amount is spent on ELA instruction teaching word-reading skills, comprehension strategies, and vocabulary. ¹³ The thinking has been that if we want children to improve their reading comprehension, we have to work on reading skills to achieve fluency before we can use reading to build knowledge. However, this false dichotomy between learning to read and reading to learn has not led to better reading achievement.

Recently, educators have begun to rethink reading instruction and consider how to better integrate knowledge acquisition with literacy in ELA instruction. ¹⁴ In these more integrated approaches, students build knowledge at the same time they are learning reading-related skills. This involves a concentrated effort to build rich and connected ideas about social studies, science, and other subjects during ELA lessons. Such instruction does not necessarily replace the science and social studies instruction that may be taking place at other times but rather supplements it. As with other content instruction, reading materials in an integrated ELA program are selected to build knowledge. Instead of reading, for example, about volcanoes one day and Rosa Parks the next, which has often been the case in ELA instruction, reading materials are arranged by topic in a logical and sequential manner and form an integrated, content-rich curriculum. In this way, knowledge is acquired and accumulated over time.

Such content-rich, connected instruction can be especially engaging and can draw children's interests to literacy and learning. Student engagement and learning can be further fostered by culturally responsive instruction. One example is a program called Readiness through Integrative Science and Engineering. ¹⁵ This program takes a home-to-school approach to connect new knowledge with culturally relevant knowledge concerning the people, places, and objects that students interact with on a daily basis. By understanding, appreciating, and connecting with this knowledge, learning can be especially enhanced for all children.

In an integrated literacy and knowledge-building curriculum, there should be a strong focus on teaching fundamental reading skills. Depending on the grade and specific skills taught, instruction in decoding, spelling, and fluency could comprise its own unit or be blended with discussion and activities designed to acquire and build content-area knowledge. Vocabulary, an important focus of ELA instruction, can be taught especially well within a content-rich, integrated curriculum. Novel words related to the content are excellent targets for instruction. These words are often repeated multiple times in a text, and their meanings are well supported by the context in which they occur. In addition, once learned, they become part of the knowledge base of the topic. General-purpose academic words, or what are sometimes referred to as Tier 2 words, also are learned more easily in a rich context. When these words are supported by content knowledge, the reader can use this knowledge to more easily infer their meaning. Also, a rich context can prove particularly helpful in learning words with multiple meanings, such as "bright" or "palm." ¹⁶

Content-rich materials are also excellent contexts in which to learn more about academic language. Written language is characterized by more complex grammar than spoken language, and students can benefit from explicit instruction in how this grammar works. Specifically, science texts tend to privilege nouns for compacting information, developing logical reasoning, and achieving precision. ¹⁷ For example, consider this text: "Asthma is a disorder in which the respiratory passages narrow significantly as a result of an allergen. This narrowing...." Here the author creates an abstract noun (i.e., "this narrowing") to represent the entire previous clause. Recognizing the referent of this abstract noun is critical to comprehension and, in cases like this, could benefit from explicit instruction. In other academic texts, students will be confronted with complex and elaborated noun phrases, rather than reduced ones, as well as challenging noun, adverbial, and adjectival clauses. For example, social studies texts use "noun clauses (e.g., 'Jefferson's next argument was that King George III had violated the colonists' rights by passing unfair laws and interfering with colonial governments'), adverbial clauses (e.g., 'Even before Washington reached Boston, the Patriots took action'), and adjectival clauses (e.g., 'He was influenced by the Enlightenment idea of the social contract, which states that governments and rulers must protect the rights of citizens') to pack a large amount of information." ¹⁸ Given this complexity, explicit instruction in how to unpack academic grammar could prove helpful to students in understanding informational texts.

Integrated approaches also can incorporate many of the same comprehension strategies employed in traditional ELA instruction. Some of these strategies, like inferencing and paraphrasing, are rather general and can be explicitly taught and used across various contexts. However, within an integrated approach, some strategies are best selected and taught based on their relevance to what is being read and for what purpose. The nature of texts and purposes for reading vary across subject matters, and thus, the strategies that may be most advantageous will vary as well.

Some of these strategies will be the common ones (e.g., mental imagery) identified by the National Reading Panel. Others will be more text- and task-specific metacognitive approaches to assist comprehension. For example, during a social studies lesson, students may be presented with an explanation or argument and asked to evaluate its validity. In such a case, students would benefit from explicit instruction and practice on how to identify a claim and judge the relevance, sufficiency, and accuracy of the evidence provided. Alternatively, science texts often provide a description of some object, animal, or process, and students are often tested on what they have learned from their reading. For such a task, students may benefit from being taught how to use a graphic organizer to summarize and categorize the information within different organizational structures. Students will also benefit from recognizing that a science text (from a trustworthy source) is an authoritative account and is different from texts in which the author's perspective is central, such as a poem or a historical figure's diary entry. This more nuanced approach to strategies becomes ever more important as students move through the grades and the comprehension skills needed are increasingly determined by the characteristics of the text and the activities carried out within the different disciplines. Nevertheless, knowledge of how disciplinary texts work, or what is called disciplinary literacy, can and should be part of instruction in the elementary grades. ¹⁹

There are now quite a few integrated, content-rich curricula being used across the country. Some of these programs are commercially available through curriculum publishers, such as Core Knowledge Language Arts and Wit & Wisdom, whereas others have been developed by researchers, such as Model of Reading Engagement. ²⁰ Some of these programs have been developed specifically to be used as part of ELA instruction. Others are truly integrated across the curriculum and operate instead of or in addition to ELA materials. There is also quite a bit of variability in the scope of literacy instruction within these programs. Nevertheless, a recent meta-analysis showed that when compared with traditional programs in which literacy and content instruction were provided separately, integrated, content-rich programs resulted in students scoring significantly better on vocabulary and comprehension (including on standardized measures of comprehension). Not surprisingly, significant gains were also made in the content taught. ²¹

Implications for Assessment

The multidimensional nature of reading comprehension presents a significant challenge for assessment. Because of the numerous factors in play, a reader's comprehension ability is more fluid than often thought. In other words, any one individual will have different levels of ability depending on what is read and for what purpose.

Perhaps the best demonstration of this variability and its impact on assessment comes from a study that included scores from 995 children who were administered four different standardized measures of reading comprehension. ²² The researchers found that the median correlation between the different tests was only .54, which was surprisingly low given that the tests purported to measure the same thing. In another analysis of the data, they identified children scoring in the lowest 10th percentile on each of the measures and compared the overlap of these groups across measures. Their results showed that, on average, only 43 percent of the children identified by one test as poor readers were also identified as poor readers on another test. In other words, the odds of any two tests diagnosing the same student as having a comprehension deficit were less than half. Further analyses showed that it was not just a problem of consistency at the lower end of the scale; there was just as much inconsistency in identifying children performing in the highest 10th percentile.

The inconsistency in the results of the different measures of reading comprehension was likely due in part to the poor reliability of these measures, something that is not uncommon for diagnostic measures of reading comprehension. On the other hand, the measures also differed in their formats, so that could have contributed to the variability. One measure employed a cloze task in which children read passages and filled in missing words. In the others, children read either passages or single sentences and then answered open-ended or multiple-choice questions. These formats are known to place different demands on reading-related processes, such as word reading, language ability, and working memory. ²³ Thus, children with different strengths and weaknesses in these processes would be expected to perform differently on the measures.

The content of the passages/sentences may also have added to the variability of the measures. That is, children were likely to have varied in their knowledge about the topics covered, and that could have influenced their performance. Such variability may be present not only across tests but also across passages within a test. For example, in the Reading for Understanding project that my colleagues and I carried out, students read four different passages from an informal reading inventory and answered open-ended questions. We observed considerable variability within students from one passage to another. It was not uncommon for a student to get nearly all the questions correct on one passage and most wrong on another. Whereas there may be several reasons for this variability, differences in background knowledge is a likely contributor.

Because of the variability due to passages, state- and national-level tests of reading use numerous passages that cover multiple topics. But, of course, this introduces the problem of these tests favoring students who have more knowledge about a broad range of topics than those with less knowledge. This has led E. D. Hirsch Jr. to argue that reading tests are actually knowledge tests in disguise. ²⁴

The fact that state and national reading tests are knowledge heavy introduces a further problem: performance on these tests will likely be more difficult to change in the short term, since knowledge acquisition is incremental in nature. Indeed, as I stated at the outset, American children's performance on NAEP has remained virtually unchanged for some time. This has been in spite of significant federal, state, and local efforts. For example, in North Carolina, the percentage of students failing to reach proficiency on state reading tests has remained largely unchanged, hovering above 50 percent, since 2013-14, when the state passed its K-3 Read to Achieve literacy act. ²⁵

Maybe the problem is not only the instructional practices teachers have been encouraged to use but also the way we are assessing comprehension. An alternative approach would be to teach children using an integrated literacy and content-rich curriculum and to test their ability to read and comprehend passages covered in that curriculum. In other words, offer a better match between instruction and assessment. Don't just test the skills and strategies that have been taught; test the specific content-area topics that have been taught. Such an approach would be fairer and more equitable for all involved. Teachers would have a clear idea of what content within which to imbed their literacy instruction. Students would have the opportunity to learn from content-rich curricula and be assessed based on what they learned in school (instead of what they may or may not have learned at home, over the summer, etc.). Also, because instruction would be better matched with assessment, there would be a greater opportunity for schools and districts to evaluate the progress they are making.

One approach that has attempted to better match instruction with assessment is being carried out within the guidelines of the Every Student Succeeds Act assessment pilot program. ²⁶ This program encourages local involvement in the development of the next generation of assessments. It allows states, with approval by the US Department of Education, to pilot new and innovative assessments in lieu of current state exams. Initially, this takes place in a small number of districts before moving on to statewide implementation. As of October 2021, five states have received approval to develop these assessments. Most notable, Louisiana has begun a multiyear process to offer a humanities assessment as an alternative to its English language arts and social studies assessments. ²⁷ The new humanities assessment draws from texts and topics that are included in the state's recommended curriculum. ²⁸ Thus, the content of the test is likely to be well matched with the instruction students receive.

A very limited pilot of this new assessment, LEAP 2025 Humanities, began in the 2018-19 school year, and then implementation was interrupted by the pandemic, ²⁹ so it will likely be several more years before researchers can evaluate the impact of this new approach. Of course, designing an assessment that is in keeping with current research on literacy development is just the first step. The extent to which the assessment will help enhance instructional practices depends on many related components, including meaningful professional development on how to use the results to inform teaching; time (appropriately allocated and compensated) for teachers to learn collaboratively as they adjust to the new assessment; genuine opportunities for all teachers to have a voice in providing feedback on the curriculum and assessment; and lower stakes tied to the assessment results such that teachers are not afraid to be innovative. In fact, one of the findings of the Reading for Understanding Initiative was that "a major roadblock to teacher uptake of new practices is the accountability infrastructure of reform movements. The more test scores matter, the less the likelihood that teachers will adopt novel teaching practices." ³⁰

Still, I am especially encouraged by Louisiana's efforts and am hopeful that other states and districts will also consider how to better align what is tested with what is taught. It is these types of programs, combined with integrated literacy and content-rich curricula, that I believe can better address comprehension. These programs move beyond characterizing comprehension as simply one of the "Big Five" and recognize its complexity and what it will take to help all children understand and learn from what they read. I look forward to attending future conferences where the results of these programs are presented.
Hugh W. Catts is a professor in the Florida State University School of Communication Science and Disorders and is affiliated with the Florida Center for Reading Research. The author of dozens of peer-reviewed articles and editor of several books, Catts has been engaged in research on language and literacy development for over four decades. Much of his work focuses on early identification and prevention of language-based reading disabilities and on reading comprehension assessment and intervention.
*For articles by Hirsch, Willingham, and Wexler on the importance of building knowledge, see the "Reading" section of American Educator's subject index. ( return to article)

Endnotes

1. P. Pearson et al., eds., Reaping the Rewards of the Reading for Understanding Initiative (Washington, DC: National Academy of Education, 2020), naeducation.org/reaping-the-rewards-of-reading-for-understanding-initiative.
2. National Assessment of Educational Progress, "National Achievement-Level Results," Grade 4, Nation's Report Card, 2019, nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/achievement/?grade=4.
3. National Reading Panel, Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction (Bethesda, MD: National Institute of Child and Human Development, 2000).
4. D. T. Willingham and G. Lovette, "Can Reading Comprehension Be Taught," Teachers College Record (September 2014).
5. C. Snow, Reading for Understanding: Toward an R&D Program in Reading Comprehension (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2002).
6. G. N. Cervetti and T. S. Wright, "The Role of Knowledge in Understanding and Learning from Text," in Handbook of Reading Research, ed. E. B. Moje et al. (Taylor and Francis Group, 2020).
7. R. Anderson, "Schema-Directed Processes in Language Comprehension," in Cognitive Psychology and Instruction, ed. A. Lesgold et al. (New York: Plenum, 1978).
8. J. Bransford and M. Johnson, "Contextual Prerequisites for Understanding: Some Investigation of Comprehension and Recall," Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 11 (1972): 722.
9. For a review written by one of these pioneers, who in turn describes several others, see S. Neuman, "The Role of Knowledge in Early Literacy," Reading Research Quarterly 36, no. 4 (November 2011): 468-75.
10. B. Boulay et al., Summary of Research Generated by Striving Readers on the Effectiveness of Interventions for Struggling Adolescent Readers, NCEE-2016-4001 (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, October 2015).
11. For a paper that addresses many of the widespread misconceptions about critical thinking, see D. T. Willingham, "How to Teach Critical Thinking," commissioned paper, Education: Future Frontiers (May 2019).
12. Pearson et al., Reaping the Rewards.
13. R. K. Blank, "What Is the Impact of Decline in Science Instructional Time in Elementary School?: Time for Elementary Instruction Has Declined, and Less Time for Science Is Correlated with Lower Scores on NAEP," prepared for the Noyce Foundation, 2012.
14. See, for example, the Knowledge Matters Campaign, knowledgematterscampaign.org, and Curriculum Matters, curriculummatters.org.
15. C. McWayne et al., "Incorporating Knowledge from Children's Homes and Communities," Young Children 75, no. 5 (December 2020): 20-26.
16. J. Gustafson, "Robust Vocabulary Instruction: Bringing Knowledge-Rich Curricula to Life," Achieve the Core, September 30, 2019.
17. Z. Fang, "Scientific Literacy: A Systematic Functional Linguistics Perspective," Science Education 89, no. 2 (March 2005): 335-47.
18. Y. Zhang, "Supporting English Language Learners in Social Studies: Language-Focused Strategies," Social Studies 108 (2017): 2.
19. C. Shanahan and T. Shanahan, "Does Disciplinary Literacy Have a Place in Elementary School?," The Reading Teacher 67, no. 8 (2014): 636-39.
20. J. Kim et al., "Improving Reading Comprehension, Science Domain Knowledge, and Reading Engagement Through a First-Grade Content Literacy Intervention," Journal of Educational Psychology 113, no. 1 (2021): 3-26.
21. H. Hwang, S. Cabell, and R. Joyner, "Does Cultivating Content Knowledge During Literacy Instruction Support Vocabulary and Comprehension in the Elementary School Years?: A Systematic Review," Reading Psychology, manuscript under review.
22. J. Keenan and C. Meenan, "Test Differences in Diagnosing Reading Comprehension Deficits," Journal of Learning Disabilities 47, no. 2 (2014): 125-35.
23. J. Keenan, R. Betjemann, and R. Olson, "Reading Comprehension Tests Vary in the Skills They Assess: Differential Dependence on Decoding and Oral Language," Scientific Studies in Reading 12, no. 3 (2008): 281-300.
24. E. D. Hirsch Jr., Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children from Failed Educational Theories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2016).
25. S. Koon, B. Foorman, and T. Galloway, "Identifying North Carolina Students at Risk of Scoring Below Proficient in Reading at the End of Grade 3," REL 2020-030 (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, Regional Educational Laboratory Southeast, August 2020).
26. Every Student Succeeds Act, Pub. L. No. 114-95 (2015).
27. For the state's documents on the assessment, see "LEAP 2025 Humanities," Assessments, Louisiana Department of Education, louisianabelieves.com/resources/library/assessment.
28. Louisiana Believes, "Louisiana's Innovative Assessment Pilot National Update," Louisiana Department of Education, August 15, 2019.
29. Louisiana Believes, "Parent Guide to the LEAP 2025 Humanities Student Reports," Louisiana Department of Education, louisianabelieves.com/docs/default-source/assessment/parent-guide-to-leap-2025-humanities.pdf; and N. Munyan-Penney and C. Barone, "Innovative Assessment Pilot: Louisiana's LEAP 2025 Humanities Assessment," Education Reform Now, November 2020, edreformnow.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Louisiana-IADA-LEAP-2025-Humanities.pdf.
30. Pearson et al., Reaping the Rewards, 5.

[Illustrations by Jessie Lin]

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Rethinking How to Promote Reading Comprehension

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It is February 2015, and I am at a national conference listening to a panel present the results of their research on improving reading comprehension. Several members of the panel, like myself and a few others in the room, are funded by the Institute of Education Sciences as part of the Reading for Understanding Initiative.

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For years, the most urgent and persistent request we heard from the teachers we work with was for a more effective and more easily implemented program for foundational skills instruction.

While most language arts standards include learning targets for foundational reading skills for kindergarten through second grade, they are not detailed enough to build a day-by-day sequence of instruction. While most schools have an abundance of resources in the form of book rooms, basal readers, and a variety of intervention program kits, there is typically insufficient guidance for how, when, and with whom to use these materials.

In response to this persistent need, our team developed UFLI Foundations, a program that includes the necessary professional learning, resources, and scaffolding for teachers to deliver high-quality instruction in foundational reading skills.

This is how UFLI Foundations was born.

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UFLI Foundations | UF Literacy Institute

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For years, the most urgent and persistent request we heard from the teachers we work with was for a more effective and more easily implemented program for foundational skills instruction. While most language arts standards include learning targets for foundational reading skills for kindergarten through second grade, they are not detailed enough to build a day-by-day sequence of instruction.

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Google Drive
UFLI Website Resources (blending app, home learning, slide decks)
Progress Monitoring Tool

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For the past two years I have been working at an international school. It is wonderful to work with and teach learners from such diverse backgrounds and cultures. The new challenge for me has been working with many learners whose first language is not English, and I have embraced this opportunity to work on an area that I wasn't exposed to as much while teaching in the UK.

I recently took an 8 week BML (bilingual and multilingual learners) course. There were some useful strategies that I picked up and started implementing in my classes. While flicking through the book of strategies, this one on Greek and Latin roots immediately caught my attention.

In Science so many of the words that we use in our lessons are derived from Greek and Latin roots, and while I sometimes make a point of linking to words we have used before (for example when discussing protostars, I make the link to prototype), I really wanted to start going deeper into root words with my classes.

As with many strategies, what is recommended for a specific group of learners is usually also good to use with other learners as well. I will not be restricting the usage of root word exploration to my English as a second language learners, but I will be using it in all of my classes across all year groups.

To that end, I started making root word cards which I will place around my teaching lab. I have made 55 cards so far, but this is a work in progress and I will be adding more as I think of them.

SET 1. You can access the pdf of the first 26 cards here:

SET 2. You can access the pdf of the next 14 cards here:

Update: October 28th 2022. SET 3. You can access the pdf of cards 41-55 here:

Update: November 20th 2022. SET 4. You can access the pdf of cards 56-70 here:

Update: December 17th 2022. SET 5. You can access the pdf of cards 71-85 here:

I will continue working on these cards as I think of some new words to include, and I am sure I have forgotten some very obvious ones in the process! I am always open to feedback, so do let me know what you think.

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For the past two years I have been working at an international school. It is wonderful to work with and teach learners from such diverse backgrounds and cultures. The new challenge for me has been working with many learners whose first language is not English, and I have embraced this opportunity to work on an...

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Search UFLI Blending Board on YouTube for tutorials!

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Literacy Consultants & Consulting Services | Erin Kent Consulting

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Literacy Consultants & Consulting Services | Erin Kent Consulting

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EKC provides literacy consultants, consulting services, and literacy professional learning for schools.

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EKC Literacy Strategist

Literacy Coach

PYP Coordinator

janelobseyeducation@gmail.com

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Epic Book: pg 18-21, 24-25

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Awhile back, I posted an opinion piece calling for the explicit teaching of sentence comprehension. With schools aiming to expose kids to complex text, it would seem that such instruction would be de rigueur. Texts are often complex because they include complicated sentences and experience tells me that students often fail to grasp the meaning of individual sentences - undermining their ability to identify main ideas, make inferences, draw conclusions, or answer any of the other question types.

Given that comprehension lessons tend to focus on "prior knowledge," vocabulary, text reading with follow-up questions, comprehension strategies, the lowly sentence gets short shrift in most programs and classrooms.

In any event, while that rant gathered some attention, it came up short.

Accordingly, I have decided to take a mulligan.

That blog articulated my opinions but neither marshalled the research evidence, nor provided much in the way of helpful instructional guidance. It called for action but was terse on specifics.

This piece should remedy those omissions.

To tell the truth, when I wrote that blog I didn't bother to search for research on sentence comprehension because, that topic never attracted much attention. There were some old studies indicating that teaching formal grammar had no impact on comprehension or writing. That seemed to settle it for most of us.

When I was working on my doctorate, a prominent reading scholar told me that "Noam Chomsky is dead." He meant it figuratively as he was trying to dissuade me from squandering my time on something as pointless as sentence comprehension.

No matter my excuses, boy was that a foolish oversight!

Over the past two decades - slowly, gradually - research on syntax and reading comprehension has accumulated. And, over the past couple of years, the numerous publications appearing in high quality psychological, educational, and linguistic journals suggests that being a sentence- comprehension researcher is now a respectable line of work, along with social media consultant or TikTok dancer.

First, the research.

These days we're all doing some handwringing over supply lines. Nevertheless, there are clearly no supply line problems to report when it comes to sentence-comprehension studies. The desert has become an oasis.

There is now a slew of rigorous studies revealing that an understanding of syntax is correlated with reading comprehension (Rand, 2002). That simply means that students who know more about how sentences are constructed do better on reading comprehension measures.

Even more persuasive is that many such studies examined that relationship AFTER controlling for differences in decoding ability, vocabulary knowledge, memory, and/or other relevant reading skills (Bowey, 1986; Bowey & Patel, 1988; Brimo, Apel, & Fountain, 2017; Brimo, Lund, & Sapp, 2018; Cain, 2007; Catts, Adlof, & Weismer, 2006; Cutting & Scarborough, 2006; Deacon & Kieffer, 2018; Gaux & Gombert, 1999; Farnia & Geva, 2013; Goodwin, Petscher, & Reynolds, 2022; Gottardo, Mirza, Koh, Ferreira, & Javier, 2018; Hagtvet, 2003; Mackay, Lynch, Duncan, & Deacon, 2021; Mokhtri & Thompson, 2006; Nation & Snowling, 2000; Nippold, 2017; Nomvete & Easterbrooks, 2019; Poulsen, Nielsen, & Vang Chrisensen, 2022; Scarborough, 1990; Scott, 2015; Shiotsu & Weir, 2007; Sorenson Duncan, Mimeau, Crowell, & Deacon, 2021; Tong & McBride, 2015).

In other words, if all students did equally well on decoding, vocabulary, and memory tests, we'd still see variations in reading comprehension ability because of syntax difference. The kids who understand syntax comprehend better than the ones who don't.

That list of studies is impressive, but not comprehensive. I didn't search carefully for these studies - combing through reference lists, using a variety of search terms and strategies, considering books and doctoral dissertations, and so on.

It is fair to point out that some such studies didn't find significant relationships between syntax and comprehension (e.g., Cain & Oakhill, 2006), though the data are sufficiently one-sided enough to conclude that any honest meta-analysis would conclude that knowledge of syntax is an essential reading skill.

That collection of studies cited above found sentence knowledge to be important to comprehension as early as 30-months old and throughout the school grades, K-12. They found that syntax mattered with regular classroom kids and those with dyslexia. They reported this pattern in English, French, Dutch, and Cantonese. They found syntax to matter with native English speakers and with English Language Learners. Syntax played a significant role in comprehension both in studies that measured those simultaneously, and in longitudinal studies which considered the role of the relationship in learning and development.

The amount of comprehension variance explained by syntax varied quite a bit from study to study (~5% to 30%). Researchers attributed some of those differences to the nature of the syntax measures, suggesting that the ability to make sense of complex sentences is more crucial than the ability to evaluate grammatical accuracy (e.g., Brimo, Lund, & Sapp, 2018). Researchers paid less attention to variations in reading comprehension measurement.

The texts included in Comprehension tests can vary a great deal in sentence complexity, and in whether the questions they ask tap into this complexity (Shanahan & Kamil, 1984).

This concern is important since syntax is a particularly important factor determining text complexity or comprehensibility (Graisser, McNamara, & Kulikowich, 2011; Stenner & Swartz, 2012). Texts with more complicated sentence structures will be a special challenge for kids who lag in sentence comprehension ability. However, at least for fifth-graders the ability to make sense of sentences with simple structures was more closely related to reading comprehension than doing so with more difficult sentences; though this may have been due to the specific demands of the particular comprehension measure used in the study (Sorenson Duncan, Mimeau, Crowell, & Deacon, 2021).

Another relevant collection of studies is those focused on oral reading fluency or text reading fluency. Such research has long shown that oral sentence reading requires skills beyond those required to read word lists - even when the words in the lists and sentences are identical (Jenkins, Fuchs, van den Broek, Espin, & Deno, 2003). That study found sentence reading to be more predictive of reading comprehension than was word list reading. Students with specific reading comprehension deficits read word lists as well as comparison students but perform more poorly than controls on text reading fluency (Cutting, Matterek, Cole, Levine, & Mahone, 2009). Research also has reported that syntax and text prosody are related to each other and to reading comprehension (Veenendaal, Groen, & Vehoeven, 2015).

If that provocative but incomplete review of the research isn't enough to convince you that sentence comprehension is a thing, then you likely can't be convinced. Your lifetime membership in the Flat Earth Society is safe and secure for the time being.

For those of you who are more open minded, let's turn to what we know about teaching sentence comprehension.

I'd love to present an equally impressive array of studies showing that if you teach sentences your state test scores will reach levels just this side of Nirvana. Unfortunately, I can't do that.

A thoughtful review (MacKay, Lynch, Duncan, & Deacon, 2021; Stoddard, Valcante, Sindelar, O'Shea, & Algozzine, 1993) recently concluded that this research is so severely limited and insufficient that it would be unwise yet to proceed pedagogically. The reasoning of these researchers is admirable and consistent with what I usually espouse - don't try to apply basic research to classroom practice. Wait for the instructional studies!

MacKay and company rightly point out that some interventions aimed at improving sentence comprehension haven't worked (e.g., Balthazar & Scott, 2018), and that interventions aimed at sentence comprehension have been hopelessly confounded (e.g., Morris, et al., 2012; Proctor, Silverman, Harring, Jones, & Hartranft, 2000; Reynolds, 2021). Although these studies reported significant reading comprehension improvement, they didn't focus on syntactic work alone but also taught morphology, vocabulary, or text structure; perhaps the gains were due to one or another of them.

The same point could be made about paraphrasing studies (Stevens, Vaughn, House, & Stillman-Spisak, 2020). Although such teaching must include some attention to translating sentences into one's own words - for the most part, these studies have emphasized paragraph paraphrases which would likely include skills that go beyond sentence interpretation. Though this approach has been successful at improving reading comprehension, it would be inappropriate to conclude from this alone that sentence instruction is a good idea.

Despite these problems, in this case, I'm going to suggest the appropriateness of cautiously proceeding with sentence comprehension teaching.

First, I believe studies that show a close connection between text reading fluency and reading comprehension to be persuasive. (I cited a few such studies but could include many more; see Breznitz, 2005 for a more rigorous treatment of these issues). MacKay and her colleagues didn't credit this dimension of the work, but if you do then the many studies showing that oral reading guidance and chunking instruction can improve reading comprehension need to be considered (NICHD, 2000; Stevens, 1981). They suggest that teaching students how to read sentences aloud with proper prosody is effective, and I believe those practices to be examples of effective sentence instruction.

Also, I know researchers differ in the weight they accord to sentence manipulation instruction. I tend to be persuaded that sentence combining and reduction improves reading comprehension (Neville & Searls, 1985; O'Hare, 1973; Wilkinson & Patty, 1993), and that provides another body of supportive instructional data - though I admit the quality of some of these studies is dubious, it is also fair to point out that the results were just as good in the best designed and implemented studies.

Finally, I identified a couple of studies that were beyond the purview of the MacKay review. One of these studies taught 9- and 10-year-olds to read fables and to identify complex sentences, constituent clauses, and subordinate conjunctions in those texts, and then to revise the fables to make them more readable. This results in significant gains in both oral and written language.

I also recently discovered a doctoral dissertation that evaluated the impact of an intriguing sentence comprehension intervention that improved reading achievement for high school students - grades 9 and 11 (Rozen, 2005). That study had teachers guiding students to analyze difficult texts sentence-by-sentence, discussing main ideas, author's purpose, inferences, and styles of passage as expressed or revealed in those sentences. They also taught students to break down difficult sentences, simplifying them, and determining the primary function of the various phrases (e.g., who does what to whom?).

The comparison groups received all the business-as-usual reading instruction - including vocabulary, strategies, and practice reading of the texts. The 15-minutes per day of sentence work was accomplished by reducing the time accorded to the other skills. The classes were taught by the same teacher and control and experimental students read the same texts.

My advice to teachers?

1. Teach oral reading fluency either with grade level classroom texts, including the texts for social studies and science. In the upper grades focus specifically on prosody issues. If the students are not reading the sentences properly - attending to punctuation and pausing in the appropriate places in terms of meaning, then the sentences will make no sense. (Although I know of no research on the practice, but I wouldn't hesitate with older students to focus this fluency work on the reading of specific complicated sentences drawn from appropriate texts).

2. I think it also makes sense to engage students in sentence combining and reduction - combining simple sentences to make complex ones and breaking more complicated sentences down into their constituent parts. For examples of this kind of work, along with a wealth of other practical syntax teaching approaches, I recommend downloading the document, "Syntactic Awareness: Teaching Sentence Structure" by Joan Sedita. I found it by typing 'Syntactic Awareness" into the search box at the Mass Literacy Website ( https://www.doe.mass.edu/massliteracy/)

3. Lots of times teachers tell me they aren't too sure whether a sentence may seem complex to the students. A good readable source that can provide guidance for identifying sentences that may be barriers to comprehension can be found for free online; an article by Cheryl M. Scott and Catherine Balthazar provides great advice regarding sentence length, subordination, relative clauses, passive voice, and other syntactic issues. ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4373700/) However, remember that even more basic sentences may pose challenges for elementary students. However, no matter how complex a sentence may be, it is only worth breaking down if it poses some impediment to comprehension. Scott and Balthazar's guidance may help you to notice whether a sentence poses a particular kind of problem (like a passive sentence seemingly confusing actor and acted upon), but an exercise aimed at comprehending such a structure, should start with a question to determine whether or not students could understand it. If understood, move on. If not understood, it would be a great basis for a lesson.

4. I think that idea of replacing some typical "guided reading" with the kind of reading intervention described earlier - guiding students to read each sentence, to paraphrase what they mean, and to break the sentences down when they have trouble paraphrasing. That strikes me as a very intelligent and supportive way to teach these skills - going faster when the kids are having no problem with a sentence and digging in to solve the problem when they do.

5. Although I've emphasized sentences heavily here, it is important to remember that individual words play an important role in sentence interpretation and syntactic understanding (Adlof & Catts, 2015; Goodwin, Petscher, & Reynolds, 2022). Meaning will often turn on coordinating conjunctions (e.g., and, but, so) or subordinating conjunctions (e.g., because, when, if). Likewise, verb tenses (e.g., swim and swam) reveal when actions took place or are taking place or will take place in time. Sentence work requires some attention to word meanings and morphology.

6. There have been several successful reading interventions that included sentence work. Those studies aren't sufficient to determine the effectiveness of the sentence comprehension part of the instruction. Nevertheless, we can take some direction from such studies - including sentence work while still teaching vocabulary, morphology, text structure, and so on. These days vocabulary instruction seems to be getting a lot of play, though the contribution of syntax to reading comprehension is similar in magnitude (Deacon & Kieffer, 2018; Shiotsu & Weir, 2007). Perhaps 15 minutes per day on sentence comprehension would be a good use of reading instruction time.
References
Adlof, S. M., & Catts, H. W. (2015). Morphosyntax in poor comprehenders. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 28(7), 1051-1070.

Balthazar, C. H., & Scott, C. M. (2007). Syntax-morphology. In A. G. Kamhi, J. J. Masterson & K. Apel (Eds.), Clinical decision making in developmental language disorders; clinical decision making in developmental language disorders (pp. 143-163). Baltimore, MD: Paul H Brookes.

Bowey, J. A. (1986). Syntactic awareness and verbal performance from preschool to fifth grade. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 15(4), 285-308.

Bowey, J. A., & Patel, R. K. (1988). Metalinguistic ability and early reading achievement. Applied Psycholinguistics, 9(4), 367-383.

Breznitz, Z. (2005). Fluency in reading: Synchronization of processes. New York: Routledge.

Brimo, D., Apel, K., & Fountain, T. (2017). Examining the contributions of syntactic awareness and syntactic knowledge to reading comprehension. Journal of Research in Reading, 40(1), 57-74.

Brimo, D., Lund, E., & Sapp, A. (2018). Syntax and reading comprehension: A meta?analysis of different spoken?syntax assessments. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 53(3), 431-445.

Cain, K. (2007). Syntactic awareness and reading ability: Is there any evidence for a special relationship? Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 679-694.

Cain, K., & Oakhill, J. (2006). Profiles of children with specific reading comprehension difficulties. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 76(4), 683-696.

Catts, H. W., Adlof, S. M., & Weismer, S. E. (2006). Language deficits in poor comprehenders: A case for the simple view of reading. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 49(2), 278-293.

Cutting, L. E., Materek, A., Cole, C. A. S., Levine, T. M., & Mahone, E. M. (2009). Effects of fluency, oral language, and executive function on reading comprehension performance. Annals of Dyslexia, 59(1), 34-54.

Cutting, L. E., & Scarborough, H. S. (2006). Prediction of reading comprehension: Relative contributions of word recognition, language proficiency, and other cognitive skills can depend on how comprehension is measured. Scientific Studies of Reading, 10(3), 277-299.

Deacon, S. H., & Kieffer, M. (2018). Understanding how syntactic awareness contributes to reading comprehension: Evidence from mediation and longitudinal models. Journal of Educational Psychology, 110(1), 72-86.

Farnia, F., & Geva, E. (2013). Growth and predictors of change in English language learners' reading comprehension. Journal of Research in Reading, 36(4), 389-421.

Gaux, C., & Gombert, J. (1999). La conscience syntaxique chez les préadolescents: Question de méthodes. L'Année Psychologique, 99(1), 45-74.

Goodwin, A. P., Petscher, Y., & Reynolds, D. (2021). Unraveling adolescent language & reading comprehension: The monster's data. Scientific Studies of Reading.

Gottardo, A., Mirza, A., Koh, P. W., Ferreira, A., & Javier, C. (2018). Unpacking listening comprehension: The role of vocabulary, morphological awareness, and syntactic knowledge in reading comprehension. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 31(8), 1741-1764.

Graesser, A.C., McNamara, D.S., & Kulikowich, J.M. (2011). Coh-Metrix providing multilevel analyses of text characteristics. Educational Researcher, 40(5), 223-234.

Hagtvet, B. E. (2003). Listening comprehension and reading comprehension in poor decoders: Evidence for the importance of syntactic and semantic skills as well as phonological skills. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 16(6), 505-539.

Hirschman, M. (2000). Language repair via metalinguistic means. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 35(2), 251-268.

Jenkins, J. R., Fuchs, L. S., van den Broek, P., Espin, C., & Deno, S. L. (2003). Sources of individual differences in reading comprehension and reading fluency. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95(4), 719-729.

Lauterbach, S. L., & Bender, W. N. (1995). Cognitive strategy instruction for reading comprehension: A success for high school freshmen. High School Journal, 79(1), 58-64.

MacKay, E., Lynch, E., Sorenson Duncan, T., & Deacon, S. H. (2021). Informing the science of reading: Students' awareness of sentence?level information is important for reading comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly.

Mokhtari, K., & Thompson, H. B. (2006). How problems of reading fluency and comprehension are related to difficulties in syntactic awareness skills among fifth-graders. Reading Research and Instruction, 46(1), 73-94.

Morris, R.D., Lovett, M.W., Wolf, M., Sevcik, R.A., Steinbach, K.A., Frijters, J.C., & Shapiro, M.B. (2012). Multiple component remediation for developmental reading disabilities: IQ, socioeconomic status, and race as factors in remedial outcome. Journal of Learning Disabilities,

Nation, K., & Snowling, M. J. (2000). Factors influencing syntactic awareness skills in normal readers and poor comprehenders. Applied Psycholinguistics, 21(2), 229-241.

Neville, D. D., & Searls, E. F. (1991). A meta-analytic review of the effect of sentence-combining on reading comprehension. Reading Research and Instruction, 31(1), 63-76.

Nippold, M.A. (2017). Reading comprehension deficits in adolescents: Addressing underlying language abilities. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 48(2), 125-131

Nomvete, P., & Easterbrooks, S. R. (2020). Phrase-reading mediates between words and syntax in struggling adolescent readers. Communication Disorders Quarterly, 41(3), 162-175.

Poulsen, M., Nielsen, J. L., & Vang Christensen, R. (2022). Remembering sentences is not all about memory: Convergent and discriminant validity of syntactic knowledge and its relationship with reading comprehension. Journal of Child Language, 49(2), 349-365.

Proctor, C. P., Silverman, R. D., Harring, J. R., Jones, R. L., & Hartranft, A. M. (2020). Teaching bilingual learners: Effects of a language?based reading intervention on academic language and reading comprehension in grades 4 and 5. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(1), 95-122.

RAND Reading Study Group (2002). Reading for understanding, toward an R&D Program in reading comprehension. Santa Monica, CA: RAND.

Rozen, S.D. (2005). Sentence disambiguation using syntactic awareness as a reading comprehension strategy for high school students. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Boston University.

Scarborough, H. S. (1990). Index of productive syntax. Applied Psycholinguistics, 11(1), 1-22.

Scott, C. M., & Balthazar, C. H. (2010). The grammar of information: Challenges for older students with language impairments. Topics in Language Disorders, 30(4), 288-307.

Scott, C.M., & Balthazar, C. (2013). The role of complex sentence knowledge in children with reading and writing difficulties. Perspectives on Literacy and Language, 39(3), 18-30.

Shanahan, T., & Kamil, M. L. (1984). The relationship of the concurrent and construct validities of cloze. In J. A. Niles, & L. A. Harris (Eds.), Changing perspectives on research in reading/language processing and instruction. (Thirty-third Yearbook of the National Reading Conference, pp. 252-256). Rochester, NY: National Reading Conference.

Shiotsu, T., & Weir, C. J. (2007). The relative significance of syntactic knowledge and vocabulary breadth in the prediction of reading comprehension test performance. Language Testing, 24(1), 99-128.

Sorenson Duncan, T., Mimeau, C., Crowell, N., & Deacon, S. H. (2021). Not all sentences are created equal: Evaluating the relation between children's understanding of basic and difficult sentences and their reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 113(2), 268-278.

Stevens, E. A., Vaughn, S., House, L., & Stillman-Spisak, S. (2020). The effects of a paraphrasing and text structure intervention on the main idea generation and reading comprehension of students with reading disabilities in grades 4 and 5. Scientific Studies of Reading, 24(5), 365-379.

Stevens, K. (1981). Chunking material as an aid to reading comprehension. Journal of Reading, 25, 126-129.

Stoddard, K., Valcante, G., Sindelar, P., O'Shea, L., & al, e. (1993). Increasing reading rate and comprehension: The effects of repeated readings, sentence segmentation, and intonation training. Reading Research and Instruction, 32(4), 53-65

Tong, X., & McBride, C. (2015). A reciprocal relationship between syntactic awareness and reading comprehension. Learning and Individual Differences, 57, 33-44.

Veenendaal, N. J., Groen, M. A., & Verhoeven, L. (2015). What oral text reading fluency can reveal about reading comprehension. Journal of Research in Reading, 38(3), 213-225.

Wilkinson, P.A., & Patty, D. (1993). The effects of sentence combining on the reading comprehension of fourth-grade students. Research in the Teaching of English, 27(1), 104-125.

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what teachers need to know about sentence comprehension

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what do teachers need to know about sentence comrehension

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what should teachers know about reading comprehension

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What Teachers Need to Know about Sentence Comprehension | Shanahan on Literacy

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This blog entry provides an overview of the research that reveals the importance of syntax knowledge and sentence comprehension.

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ICS Zurich Learning Lab Notecatcher 2024

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Shared Text Comprehension Planning Template

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UFLI structure guide with ideas for transitions & rituals - AISG 2024 

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SPELD SA Phonic Book Sets

About the series

The SPELD SA Phonic Book Series complements the teaching of reading and writing using a structured synthetic phonics approach. SPELD SA aims to help Aboriginal students engage with phonic books by having characters, content and settings that reflect Aboriginal communities.

We understand that the content, settings and characters may not reflect all Aboriginal people and their experiences but hope that Aboriginal students learning to read can find some familiarity in and connection with these books in their literacy journey.

About the cover

Elizabeth Close is an Anangu woman from the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara language groups in the APY Lands in outback South Australia. She was born in Adelaide and spent much of her upbringing in remote communities, learning her language and receiving cultural education.

'This artwork represents the literacy and numeracy learning journey, and the path towards independent learning. The circles represent the collaborative learning and supports around children with specific learning difficulties, including children, schools, families, SPELD SA and others.'  Elizabeth Close, Artist.

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Our Phonic Books support the teaching of reading by using a structured synthetic phonics approach (Sounds-Write and Jolly Phonics series). They are designed to build on the pre-reading skills of oral language and phonological awareness needed for reading success.

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Reading 101: Self-Paced Learning Modules

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Core knowledge about reading is a key to effective literacy instruction. Our free, self-paced learning modules can help you deepen your understanding of the building blocks of reading and writing.

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Creating a literacy block schedule can be one of the most challenging parts of teaching reading and writing in K-2! There's so much to fit in, you have limited time, and your kids have SO many different needs. Plus, if you've learned about the Science of Reading, it can feel impossible to create a Structured Literacy schedule that addresses all necessary skills, without spending 4 or 5 hours each day teaching literacy!

Good news, though...it IS possible to create a schedule that covers all the important Science of Reading skills and actually works in a real classroom. In this post, I'm going to take you through my simple, 3-step process to create a Structured Literacy schedule for a Kindergarten, 1st, or 2nd grade classroom.

It might be a little different from how you've normally created a schedule, but hang with me! By the end, you'll see how this process can save you a ton of stress and allows you to leave behind feelings of "I can't fit it all in!"

If you'd like to follow along with the FREE printable materials I show you throughout this blog post, grab my Science of Reading K-2 Schedule Toolkit here!

Step 1: Get clear on how long you will spend teaching each skill area.

In my free toolkit, I give you guidance on about how long to spend on each essential Science of Reading skill area.

I broke this up into separate sheets for Kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grade. You'll also notice that I divided up the skills into "teacher-led" (instruction and guided practice) and "independent student practice." This is key to implementing Structured Literacy, because students will need explicit, direct instruction, followed by supported practice, and then independent practice.

Note that the total amount of time for the skill areas may vary somewhat, depending upon students' needs and any time restrictions you have.

Step 2: Consider how you will incorporate explicit instruction into all Structured Literacy skill areas.

In this step, you'll read over the checklist below (again, it's included in my free toolkit):

When you use explicit instruction, you'll want to intentionally plan for how students will gradually assume responsibility for practicing a skill independently. Your explicit, direct instruction, supported practice, and independent practice could happen all in one lesson, but more than likely, it will take multiple lessons. Therefore, you should plan for this in advance.

For example, on Monday you might model and use think-alouds to teach your first graders a comprehension strategy like retelling the most important information from a nonfiction text. On Tuesday and Wednesday, you might provide opportunities for supported practice (with continued modeling, but less than on Monday). Then, on Thursday and potentially Friday, students practice the strategy more independently.

It's helpful to think through how you will gradually release responsibility so that you can set up your schedule accordingly! Not every day will look exactly the same, and that's okay (it's actually a good thing!).

Step 3: Create your Structured Literacy schedule by planning for skill blocks, not activity blocks!

Years ago, I would create a schedule like this:

10-10:15: Read-aloud

I listed out instructional routines, like read-aloud, small group, or any specific programs I had to teach.

Now, this is NOT what I recommend! Instead, I recommend you scheduling by skill. I explain this in much more detail in my Science of Reading course for teachers.

But in a nutshell, scheduling by skill:

Helps ensure that you are truly covering all essential skill areas (and not letting certain ones fall by the wayside, like vocabulary)

Cuts down on the feeling of "I can't fit it all in"

Allows you to stop trying to cram so much into small group instruction - because you see that skills are covered during other parts of your literacy block

It's not that you don't use programs or routines, but you think about them differently. They become tools that you use in order to help students master skills - not an end in themselves.

In the free toolkit, I give you this simple template so you can schedule by skill:

Did you grab the free toolkit yet? If not, do so here!

If you'd like to have ready-to-use schedules so this process is DONE for you, check out my Science of Reading course for K-2 teachers!

This course will help you:

🌟 Master the Science of Reading as it applies to teaching K-2

🌟 Create daily and weekly schedules that apply the Science of Reading

🌟 Feel confident that you're giving ALL your students the tools they need to become successful readers and writers!

In this course, I cover the most important principles about the science of reading that you need to know - without sending you into information overload!

I also teach you how to translate the science of reading into an easy-to-implement daily and weekly schedule.

I show you what to do when you don't have as much time as you need to teach literacy, and/or when your existing curriculum doesn't follow the science of reading.

AND I give you ready-made, detailed schedules for structured literacy in grades K, 1st, and 2nd that you can download and start using immediately!

This is a self-paced course , which means that you can watch the short videos whenever you have time!

In addition to the videos, you also get downloadable resources, like...

> The schedules I described above

> Links to additional free resources to support your Science of Reading instruction

Additionally, at the end of the course, you can choose to take a quick quiz if you want a certificate of completion (with your name on it) to be emailed to you for professional development credits.

When you purchase, you have forever access to the course (no yearly fee or future purchases required).

Read more about the course at this link!

Happy teaching!

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How to Create a Structured Literacy Schedule for K-2 Based On the Science of Reading - Learning at the Primary Pond

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It's hard to fit it all into your schedule! Here's my 3-step process that makes it easier to create your K-2 structured literacy schedule.

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📌 Structured Literacy Scheduling Checklist: Grades 3-5

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Reciprocal teaching is a cooperative learning strategy that aims to improve students’ reading comprehension skills, with four components: predicting, clarifying, questioning, and summarizing. A group of students take turns acting as the teacher in guiding the comprehension of a text.

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Reciprocal Teaching for the Primary Grades

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Reciprocal Teaching for the Primary Grades

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August, D., Carlo, M.S., Dressler, C., & Snow, C.E. (2005). The critical role of vocabulary development for English language learners. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 20(1), 50- 57. doi: 10.1111/j.1540-5826.2005.00120.x

August, D., & Shanahan, T. (Eds.). (2006). Developing literacy in second-language learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Biemiller, A., & Boote, C. (2006). An effective method for building vocabulary in primary grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98(1), 44-62. doi:10.1037/0022-0663.98.1.44

Carlo, M.S., August, D., McLaughlin, B., Snow, C.E., Dressler, C., Lippman, D., et al. (2004). Closing the gap: Addressing the vocabulary needs of English language learners in bilingual and mainstream classrooms. Reading Research Quarterly, 39(2), 188-215. doi:10.1598/RRQ.39.2.3

Duke, N.K. (2000). 3.6 minutes per day: The scarcity of informational texts in first grade. Reading Research Quarterly, 35(2), 202-224. doi: 10.1598/RRQ.35.2.1

Echevarria, J., Short, D., & Powers, K. (2006). School reform and standards-based education: A model for English-language learners. The Journal of Educational Research, 99(4), 195-210. doi:10.3200/JOER.99.4.195-211

Englert, C.S., & Hiebert, E.H. (1984). Children's developing awareness of text structures in expository materials. Journal of Educational Psychology, 76(1), 65-75. doi:10.1037/0022- 0663.76.1.65

Hiebert, E.H., & Lubliner, S. (2008). The nature, learning, and instruction of general academic vocabulary. In A.E. Farstrup & S.J. Samuels (Eds.), What research has to say about vocabulary instruction (pp. 106-129). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Jacobs, V.A. (2002). Reading, writing, and understanding. Educational Leadership, 60(3), 58-61.

Klingner, J.K., & Vaughn, S. (1996). Reciprocal teaching of reading comprehension strategies for students with learning disabilities who use English as a second language. The Elementary School Journal, 96(3), 275-293. doi:10.1086/461828

Kletzien, S.B., & Dreher, M.J. (2004). Informational text in K-3 classrooms: Helping children read and write. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Moll, L., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory Into Practice, 31(2), 132-141.

Raphael, T.E., Englert, C.S., & Kirschner, B.M. (1986). The impact of text structure instruction and social context on students' comprehension and production of expository text (Research Series No. 177). East Lansing: Michigan State University, Institute for Research on Teaching.

Silverman, R.D. (2007). Vocabulary development of Englishlanguage and English-only learners in kindergarten. The Elementary School Journal, 107(4), 365-383. doi:10.1086/516669

Singer, H., & Donlan, D. (1989). Reading and learning from text (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Weaver, C.A., III, & Kintsch, W. (1991). Expository text. In R. Barr, M.L. Kamil, P.B. Mosenthal, & P.D. Pearson (Eds.), Handbook of reading research (Vol. 2, pp. 230-245). New York: Longman.

Williams, J.P., Hall, K.M., Lauer, K.D., Stafford, K.B., DeSisto, L.A., & deCani, J.S. (2005). Informational text comprehension in the primary grade classroom. Journal of Educational Psychology, 97(4), 538-550. doi:10.1037/0022-0663.97.4.538

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Reciprocal Teaching for the Primary Grades: "We Can Do It, Too!"

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Originally designed with seventh grade students, Reciprocal Teaching is a research-based strategy that teaches students to work in small groups to coordinate the use of four comprehension strategies: prediction, clarification, summarization, and student-generated questions. This article illustrates how to implement Reciprocal Teaching for the Primary Grades (RTPG).

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Access various reading and math resources and educational tools related to Lexile and Quantile levels for teachers and parents.

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Thrive Literacy Corner - Thrive Educational Services

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Since I have written about the science of reading, heart words, and explicit phonics instruction, so many of you have reached out and asked, "so how do I set up my literacy block and work with students in small groups?"

I know it can be overwhelming learning that what you've been doing needs to change, especially with all the challenges teachers face with time and curriculum restraints.

In this post, I'm sharing a literacy block template you can use to set up your reading and writing instruction, just in time for the new school year!

But before I get into it, make sure you complete the right literacy assessments before planning out anything for the year.

What should literacy instruction include?

The 3 main areas that you want to focus on in your literacy instruction are:

When planning out your literacy block, make sure every activity targets one of these three areas.

Decoding

Decoding requires phonological awareness, phonics, and blending and segmenting. Students should be able to hear and manipulate sounds in words, understand relationships between graphemes and phonemes, and manipulate parts of words. These are the things you will focus on in your phonics lessons and activities.

Some activities that you can include in your lessons that address decoding include:

Elkonin boxes

Syllable splitting

Syllable blending

Segmenting phonemes

Blending phonemes

Phoneme deletion and subsitution

Highlight target phonics pattern

Phonics games

Memory or matching game

Word building

Search for target phonics pattern

Word work worksheets

Heart words (high frequency words)

Fluency

Fluency requires the ability to read smoothly, with expression, at the right pace, and with attention to punctuation. Including activities that build fluency is important.

Some activities that address fluency include:

Read alouds

Shared reading

Re-reading

Independent reading

Listening to an audio book

Choral reading

Partner reding

Readers' Theatre

Grammar instruction

Comprehension

Comprehension requires vocabulary knowledge, background knowledge, and language comprehension. These are the things you will focus on in your comprehension instruction.

Some activities that address comprehension include:

Reading a nonfiction passage to increase background knowledge

Voabulary instruction

Retelling

Summarizing

Shared reading

Read-Alouds

Independent reading

Science & social studies content (increases background knowledge)

Think alouds

Stop and retell

Visualization

Literacy Block Schedule Template

I know that every school has different time requirements and even specific activity requirements for reading and writing instruction. You might be able to adapt what you are currently doing and swap some activities or change up the timing to fit with what research says actually works to improve reading.

Sometimes administrators need a little education on why certain programs or activities need to be updated or changed, and hopefully, you don't encounter a lot of pushback with this.

Here is a sample of what a literacy block should look like for kindergarten through second grade:

Sound Manipulation - 10 minutes of activities that build phonological awareness

Phonics - about 30 minutes of activities that focus on decoding, encoding, phonological awareness, high frequency words, and vocabulary

Shared or close reading - 10 minutes of activities that adress print and book skills, phonics, fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary

Read-aloud & vocabulary - 15 minutes of activities that focus on comprehension, vocabulary, and modeling fluency

Writing - 30-45 minutes of acvities that teach encoding, fine motor skills, and grammar

Independent Reading - 10 minutes or less

Small Groups - 30-45 minutes of activities that reinforce phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, comprehension, and vocbaulary

These activities DO NOT have to be scheduled in this order, nor do the activities need to stick within these recommended time frames.

Think of transition times that you can do phonemic awareness activities like while walking to lunch. You could do a read-aloud while students eat their morning or afternoon snack. Some of these activities could be independent small group activities that your students work on while you work with another group.

Break up the longer time frames if needed. For example, in Kindergarten you may do half of your small group instruction in the morning and the other half in the afternoon, so that the other students are not doing independent work for so long (because you know they will get off task after about 10 minutes or so).

Think about what programs you're currently using and assess which areas they address: decoding, fluency, and/or comprehension. You don't need to include everything every day. You can do certain activities less often, or try a schedule that alternates activities so it takes 2 days to go through all the areas.

What you do want to have each day is a little bit of instruction that addresses decoding, fluency, and comprehension. But be flexible and realistic. Some people can't fit all this into their daily schedule. Do the best that you can with what you have available to you.

What do students do for independent work while you are working with a small group?

I get this question so often, so I'm betting you were thinking about this while looking at that schedule.

Here are a few ideas for independent work:

Follow up activity from the small group lesson

Independent reading

Read a decodable text

Partner reading

Summary writing or filling out a graphic organizer about a text

Listening to an audiobook

Spelling practice

Handwriting practice

Word work

Peer dictation

Phonics games students can play with a partner or small group

Heart word practice

Phonics apps or computer games

Writing activity/journal

You want students to practice what you have taught previously. Choose activities that don't require you to check their work too often and that have little room for error. This time can easily be wasted if students don't understand what to do or do not have enough instruction to practice the target skills.

Using decodable texts is key for independent activities to be beneficial for students. Students should be using texts that they can read 100% on their own.

How to make small groups/centers and Daily 5 work with the Science of Reading

During your small group instruction, you can choose to set up groups or centers for students to do their independent work. You can adapt the Daily 5 to work with this by modifying centers a bit.

Choose the 4 activities that you want students to work on independently. Choose activities that you can easily swap out the skill without creating new materials or a completely new activity that needs to be taught. For example, you can choose Summary Writing as an activity where students use a graphic organizer to write a short summary of a story. Or you could use a partner phonics game where you simply need to swap out the words used in the game to align with current instruction. Just make sure every activity includes skills the students can do on their own.

And you probably already know this, but make sure to explicitly teach all of these before you set them off to work independently!

Example Literacy Block

Below is an example of a literacy block for one week.

I hope this post helps you plan out your literacy instruction. If you need a more specific guide and outline to follow, I recommend the book How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction (grades k-3).
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If you're looking for more tips on teaching reading to struggling learners, check out these other posts:

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Literacy Block Scheduling That Aligns With the Science of Reading

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Since I have written about the science of reading, heart words, and explicit phonics instruction, so many of you have reached out and asked, "so how do I set up my literacy block and work with students in small groups?"