Kids' thinking matters! When kids in classrooms begin to understand that their thinking matters, reading changes. Suddenly the refrain of "What time is recess? When's lunch?" transforms into the anthem of "Can we please go read now?" As teachers, we take kids' thoughts, ideas, opinions and learning seriously. We design instruction that engages kids and guides them as they grapple with the information and concepts they encounter in school, particularly as they read informational text.

We can't read kids minds. One way to get a window into their understanding is to help them surface, talk about, and write about their thinking. The Comprehension Toolkit emphasizes reading, writing, talking, listening, and investigating as the hallmarks of active literacy. These are the cornerstones of our approach to teaching and learning and the means to deeper understanding and expanded thinking. The Toolkit reveals the language of thinking we use to explicitly teach kids to comprehend the wide variety of informational text they encounter. Through the Toolkit lessons, we demonstrate how our teaching language becomes the kids' learning language.

The teaching and learning focus is on comprehension instruction, including monitoring comprehension, activating and building background knowledge, asking questions, inferring meaning, determining importance, and summarizing and synthesizing. These strategies support kids to learn and understand what they read. Reading comprehension is not about answering a list of end-of-chapter questions. Reading comprehension is the evolution of thought that occurs as we read. Understanding happens when readers have an inner conversation with the text. When readers read informational text, they need to merge their thinking with the information to learn, understand and remember it beyond Friday's quiz.

David Perkins suggests that "knowledge does not just sit there…it functions richly in people's lives to help them understand and deal with the world." Real world reading promotes the active use of knowledge. We read to learn something new, change our thinking, satisfy our curiosity, and even discover something we couldn't have imagined. Bringing the real world into the classroom offers kids a constellation of possibilities for talking, reading, writing, and investigating. We flood the room with trade books, magazines, newspapers, picture books, essays and poems to bring the larger world into focus. As kids read, write, talk, and think about these texts, they expand thinking and develop insight.

The Comprehension Toolkit is not an add-on. It replaces rote fill-in-the-blank activities and worksheets with practices that engage kids and foster active thinking. For years, students have plowed their way through dense expository text that confounds them with its information overload. They learn how to answer the end-of-chapter questions in the textbook without even reading it. The Toolkit is designed to help kids negotiate informational text, to think about what they are reading and to hold that thinking so that they understand, remember and use it.