Topic: Whole Book Comprehension

If we want kids to succeed with the reading they do in content areas across the day, teachers needs to be ready to teach the comprehension strategies that discipline demands.

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 .

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.

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 Book Comprehension is a research-based and practical approach for grades 1-6 that combines grade-level fiction and nonfiction trade books with explicit instruction and integrated assessment to help students build and expand key comprehension skills across longer texts.

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.