Text Connections - The intervention course that gives reading a whole new meaning!

OVERVIEW

TextConnections is a full-year course specifically designed for adolescents who have mastered basic phonics and decoding skills, but lack solid comprehension and critical-thinking skills.

TextConnections:

• focuses on comprehension skills and strategies with support from vocabulary, fluency, writing, and independent reading instruction
   
• has clearly stepped-out lessons to make it easy to
  teach reading
   
• at the secondary level
   
• includes research-based, engaging, interactive instruction that brings success and reading back into the lives of striving adolescent learners

Text Connections Units provide a variety of texts across subject areas:

Strand by Strand... The Highlights

Comprehension

Because comprehension is the end goal of reading, TextConnections focuses instruction on the cognitive and metacognitive strategies proven to help students become successful, independent readers and critical thinkers.

Explicit instruction focuses on key strategies such as:
Generating questions

• Making inferences
• Monitoring comprehension (including learning to think aloud)
• Visualizing
• Summarizing and synthesizing
• Building on prior knowledge
• Connecting text to text, text to self, and text to world

Vocabulary

Students develop key areas of vocabulary that are critical to understanding difficult text. By building knowledge of academic vocabulary, structural vocabulary, and content-specific terminology, students are better able to comprehend text across subject areas.

Fluency

Striving adolescent learners improve fluency by focusing on one characteristic of fluent reading at a time with leveled fluency practice passages that match students’ ability levels.

Independent Reading

Independent reading in the program provides opportunities for students to apply their new skills and strategies. They gain confidence and motivation needed to become successful readers and thinkers.

Writing

Writing contributes to comprehension by helping students become more active classroom participants. Students complete a range of writing activities, such as Quickwrites, open-ended responses, and process writing assignments.

Student Materials

Student Guide
The student guides include selections from a variety of literary genres, including fiction, high-interest articles, and informational text. Additionally, a wide range of expository texts in the content-areas, including science and social studies, reinforce and expand core knowledge.

• Over 60 short selections with space for interactive notes
   
• Graphic organizers
   
• Fluency passages and rubrics
  

• Comprehension checks
   
• Goals contract
   
• Self assessments

• Interactive resource for vocabulary development
   
• Process for building academic vocabulary

Student Literature: Green Level

Typically for Grades 6–9

Interactive Magazine Breakthrough! is a magazine-style collection of articles, fiction, cartoons, and poems about breakthroughs—in music, communication, medicine, space, and more.

Expository Chapter Book Radical Radiation! Life in the Atomic Age informs readers about radiation and atomic theory and their positive and negative effects on society from medical x-rays to catastrophic bombs in World War II.

Graphic Novel Mars Colony is a science fiction graphic novel that tells the story of the Changs, one of 128 families sent to Mars in the year 2130 to form the first human colony.

Award-winning Novel The Window by Jeanette Ingold is the story of a teenage girl who survives a car accident that kills her mother and leaves her blind and alone. Living with relatives she doesn’t know and struggling to adjust to life without her sight are just some of her challenges.

Student Literature: Magenta Level

Interactive Magazine Revolution! contains 12 interactive articles including examinations of the lives of noted individuals (Nelson Mandela, Elizabeth Eckford, Steve Biko, and others) who have fought for freedom and equality.

Award-winning Novel Very Far Away from Anywhere Else by celebrated author Ursula K. LeGuin follows the course of two teenagers’ friendship during their senior year of high school. This affecting novel is a coming-of-age portrayal of young adults struggling to be true to themselves and follow their dreams.

Expository Chapter Book The Cloning Controversy provides a brief and accessible introduction to genetics, as it explores the controversy surrounding the possibility of human cloning.

Graphic Novel In a Class of Her Own is a historical fiction graphic novel that also features expository text about the true story of Ruby Bridges, the six-year-old girl who made civil rights history in 1960 as the first African American to attend an all-white school in New Orleans.