What is Reading Power?

Reading Power is a reading comprehension program that helps students develop comprehensions skills to become more powerful readers and thinkers. The five comprehension strategies, or Reading Powers, we are teaching are:

1) Connecting – What does the story remind me of?

2) Question – What am I wondering about this story?

3) Visualize – What pictures can I make in my head from this story?

4) Infer – What am I thinking about this story that isn’t actually written?

5) Transform – How has my thinking changed because of this story?

The Key Ideas

• Learning to read involves two distinct, yet equally important components:

1) Decoding – the ability to read the words on the page with fluency and accuracy

2) Comprehension – the ability to construct meaning from the text

• Comprehension strategies need to be taught directly and explicitly so that students can understand what “thinking” looks like and sounds like.

• Common language of these thinking strategies is essential for helping students acquire the “language of thinking” across the grades

• Meta-cognition, or “awareness of thinking”, is an important component to this progra

• Teachers and parents can model their thinking voice while they read to and with their children to help teach and reinforce the strategies

• We have two voices: a “speaking voice” and a “thinking voice”. Good readers pay attention to their thinking voice while they read.