Topic: Comprehension

Explicit instruction turns talking and writing from classroom routine into real engines of comprehension. Talking and writing is most powerful when we teach students how to build a discussion, how to choose what matters, how to jot a note that's worth revisiting, how to shape a written response with purpose.

We build knowledge through content study and thoughtful text choices, but active comprehension strategies are what let kids do something with that content so it sticks.

Planning for the demands of a text starts with assessing the text itself. Jennifer Serravallo breaks down how every text makes its own demands on a reader and how to approach it.

Our students' attention has changed, and there's research behind why. Jennifer Serravallo breaks down the active view of reading and how we can explicitly teach stamina and focus .

The five elements Jennifer Serravallo considers every time she plans a comprehension lesson. Learn more about background knowledge, vocabulary, writing about reading, strategies and prompts, and conversation.

Whole books make different demands on readers than short texts like articles, excerpts, and short stories. If your reading program is exclusively, or mostly, built around short texts and the whole books have been shelved, it’s time to course-correct.

Feeling stuck between mandates and meaningful teaching? Join Heinemann authors Ellin Oliver Keene, Cris Tovani, Debbie Miller, Anne Goudvis, and Steph Harvey for a multi-event webinar to explore how to bring comprehension, thinking, and engagement back to literacy instruction.

Explore how nonfiction decodables support phonics development, build background knowledge, and help beginning readers apply skills in meaningful contexts.

Examine how decodable texts can support comprehension by reducing cognitive load and making meaning accessible to early readers.

Kylene Beers offers 5 ways teachers can help students improve fluency.

A routine for exploring works of art and other interesting things: What do you see? What do you think about that? What does it make you wonder?

Background knowledge acts as a framework that students can use to connect new information to what they already know, deepening their reading comprehension.

Content Area Reading Sets empower students to become confident, capable readers by integrating rich, real-world content into daily instruction.

By turning proven research into practical classroom resources, Content Area Reading Sets help students grow into confident, capable readers.

Real-world content connects reading to the world around us, inspiring curiosity, building knowledge, and supporting literacy growth.

Comprehension is the heart of literacy instruction and targeting it during whole-group literacy time ensures that all students are building the skills they need to become thoughtful, engaged readers.

Saxon Reading Foundations K–2 provides systematic, explicit, incremental, and cumulative instruction with application and continual review with foundational literacy skills that benefit all learners, particularly those students with dyslexia.

There are many ways to use Jump Rope Readers in your classroom. Like all decodable books, they can support whole class lessons, small group work, and independent practice.