Chapter books challenge readers' ability to synthesize and accumulate information, and sustain comprehension. Longer texts require readers to be more skilled around the goals of:

• sustaining understandings about plots that have many events, and may include events out of order (flashback, foreshadowing)
• visualizing

As nonfiction books become more sophisticated, they challenge students’ ability to synthesize and accumulate information and sustain comprehension. Longer texts require readers to be more skilled around the goals of:

• Determining the main idea of of sections, chapters, and the whole book
• Identifying and separating

Chapter books and increasingly complex nonfiction books challenge readers' ability to synthesize and accumulate information, and sustain comprehension. Longer texts require readers to be more skilled around several key goals:

• Fiction: Plot and setting; character; vocabulary and figurative language; and themes and ideas
• Nonfiction: Main

Why has comprehension instruction become so complex?

Sharon Taberski cuts through the pressurized, strategy-overloaded, fluency-crazed atmosphere surrounding reading instruction to lay out the reading and writing workshop practices that are most effective in developing readers in the primary grades. She shares the daily how-tos needed... more