Starting Comprehension - Stories to Advance Reading & Thinking

Promote reading for meaning in beginning readers
Starting Comprehension is based on the assumption that children do not all learn to use phonetic, semantic, and syntactic reading cues in the same order, or with the same ease. Students using this series develop comprehension of words, sentences, and short passages through 4 different types of exercises.

1. Vocabulary exercises introduce, in context, most of the words used in the workbooks. Students can refer to these pages if they are unsure of a word in a passage.

2. Literal Comprehension exercises ask questions about factual details. On the most elementary level, this involves answering yes/no questions or using internal logic. At a more sophisticated level, the student answers factual questions about a longer passage.

3. Inferential Comprehension exercises ask students to identify the correct summary or recognize the main idea of a selection.

4. In Organizational Comprehension exercises, the student relates, or organizes, the information in a passage. In the Starting Phonetically strand, students organize the information sequentially—what happened first, next, etc. In the Starting Visually strand, students organize the information by category—which items belong in the category.