Comprehension

Helps kids learn to love reading through good comprehension

Reading comprehension is a skill separate from the understanding or ‘decoding’ of individual words.

The enjoyment of reading comes from comprehension, not decoding words. Kids who love to read have good comprehension skills.

Comprehension skills need to be taught, not just tested

Key reading comprehension skills include:

  • identifying and summarizing the main idea of a text
  • comparing & contrasting
  • identifying supporting facts and details
  • making inferences & drawing conclusions
  • predicting outcomes
  • recognizing fact & opinion
  • recognizing realism versus fantasy
  • identifying cause & effect
  • recognizing sequence of events
  • identifying story elements such as main characters, settings, plot, conflict, solution,
  • identifying the author’s purpose and point of view
  • interpreting literary devices such as imagery, symbolism and metaphors

Reading comprehension worksheets

Our reading comprehension worksheets include over 200 children's stories as well as reading worksheets focused on specific reading skills.

Stories:

Children's Stories

Short stories, passages or poems followed by reading comprehension exercises.  For early grades, most exercises focus on recalling information directly from the text.

Leveled Stories

Stories leveled from A-Z with respect to reading difficulty.  A sampling from our series of leveled stories workbooks.

Fables & historic passages

Fables and historic passages followed by comprehension exercises.
 

Comprehension Worksheets:

Compare and contrast

Identify how story elements (characters, plot details, etc) are alike or different.
 

Main idea and supporting details

Identify the main idea and supporting details of short texts.
 

Sequencing

Place events in their natural sequence based on a text.
 

Story elements

Analyze characters, settings, plots and author's purpose.
 

Conclusions and inferences

Draw conclusions and make inferences from short texts.
 

Context clues

Use context clues to guess the meaning of new words.
 

Cause and effect

Study cause and effect relationships described in a text.
 

Fact vs fiction

Identify statements as being fact (real) or fiction (make-believe).
 

Fact vs opinion

Distinguish between fact and opinion in selected texts.
 

Prediction

Make predictions based on what you have read.
 

Figurative language

Identify metaphors and similes in short stories.

Reading comprehension workbooks

Our reading comprehension workbooks are centered around our A-Z series of leveled readers. These are collections of stories which are leveled based on a number of factors related to test complexity; each story is followed by comprehension exercises. A full description of all our workbooks is available in our bookstore.

Levelled Readers for K-5

Reading Comprehension, Leveled Readers

Our A-Z series of levelled readers, spanning kindergarten through grade 5

Short plays for grades 1-3

Short Plays for Grades 1-3

A collection of 10 original plays for kids in grades 1-3.

Short Plays for Grades 3-5

Short Plays for Grades 3-5

A collection of 12 original plays with exercises for kids in grades 3-5.