Reading Comprehension
This fun and engaging reading comprehension program helps children build foundational literacy skills that will support their success in elementary school. These courses combine the best fiction and non-fiction texts, taking students on a literary journey across genres, through time periods and with diverse authors.
Level 1
Target Student: K-G1; Reading Level A-D
Course Description: In this fun and engaging reading course, students will build foundational reading skills that will support their success in kindergarten and prepare them for first grade. Students focus on reading comprehension and critical thinking, learning to ask questions about important details, developing strategies to describe characters, settings, and events. Primary inferring skills are taught using action and dialogues in the text. Students will build strong vocabulary skills by teachers’ prompt of asking questions about unknown words.
Books: Wemberly Series, Night of the Veggie Monster, Bear With Me, Jabari Jumps, Otis Series, Big Al, King of the Playground, Ruby the Copycat, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, Princess Penelope’s Parrot, Hat Series
Level 2
Target Student: G1-2; Reading Level E-I
Course Description: This fun and interactive reading course helps students become confident readers with strong comprehension skills and deep interest in reading. Through guided and independent reading formats, students learn and practice a variety of comprehension strategies to ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of characters, setting, and plot. Students will be taught to compare and contrast the different fairy tales, folktales, or fables. Students are encouraged to actively engage the context, think critically of the characters, and make connections with the surrounding world.
Books: Mr. Peabody’s Apples, A Bad Case of the Stripes, Enemy Pie, The Raft, The English Roses, Brave Irene, Each Kindness, The Otherside, Mr. Lincoln’s Way, Thank You Mr. Falker, Fly Away Home, When Charlie McButton Loses Power
Level 3
Target Student: G2-3; Reading Level J-N
Course Description: This reading course will transition into using chapter books. Students need to carry over evidence on multiple pages, meaning they will be able to retell what happened in a previous chapter or chapters. Students are taught to ask wonder questions without prompting based on key details in the text. The continuation of previous skills is pivotal in this course, including using information gained from illustrations and words in print to demonstrate understanding of characters, setting and plot, describing the overall structure of a story, and determining the meaning of unknown words (vocabulary).
Books: The Magic Finger, Amelia Bedelia, Too Cool, Ellray Jakes is Not a Chicken, Amber Brown is Not a Crayon, Capital Mysteries, Nate the Great
Level 4
Target Student: G3-4; Reading Level O-Q
Course Description: In this enjoyable and engaging reading course, students continue to hone accuracy, proficiency, and in-depth comprehension skills through a variety of novel study, including fantasy and mystery novels. Students develop strategies to ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of key details in text and make relevant connections to and refer explicitly to the text. They will be able to describe the characters in the story (their traits, motivations, or feelings) and how their actions contribute to the plot/problem. Besides, students will continue reinforcing the skills learned at the previous level.
Books: Mr. Stink, There’s a Boy in the Girl’s Bathroom, Stone Fox, Danger on the Midnight River, Dragons in a Bag, James and the Giant Peach, The BFG, Regarding the fountain, Edgar Allen’s Official Crime Investigation Notebook
By the end of the program, students will have carefully examined classic fiction and nonfiction texts of many forms and mastered reading comprehension strategies, including effectively identifying evidence, comparing structure, predicting plot and interpreting intent. As they progress through the series, students will start reading longer and more complicated texts that include a greater proportion of non-literal language (figurative language) to further comprehension level and build academic vocabulary. Courses are available for both semester and summer schedules.
