Specific Skills Series: Comprehensive 9-Book Literacy Set

This 9-book set has the reading activities useful for the older student whose skills are below grade level. Topics include locating information, fact and opinion, making inferences, reading for details, finding the main idea, reading to understand, and comparing. High-interest reading passages are followed by comprehension and logic activities designed to strengthen students’ reading skills.

The Specific Skills Series Set includes the following 9 books:

Summarising

Help students organise and summarise information with these short, easy-to-read passages, guided activities, and story webs. This 32-page book offers lots of practice identifying the main idea, summarising stories, writing supporting sentences, and more.

Comparing

– Critical thinking is promoted by the 24 lessons in this learning unit. Students are asked to read articles on two related subjects: “Bees” and “Wasps”, The “Nile” and “Mississippi” rivers, and more. Then, students are given the task of listing all the similarities and all the differences between the two subjects.

Fact & Opinion

This 23-lesson book is packed with informative short stories, comprehension questions, and various research activities. It provides valuable practice in distinguishing facts from opinions. The lessons begin with “fact” stories, move on to “opinion” stories, and then to tales that contain both. As students progress through the lessons, they learn to differentiate between the two.

Finding the Main Idea

Being able to determine main ideas is crucial to writing book reports, outlining, reading social studies and science materials, and general reading comprehension. This 26 exercises have been designed to help develop a thinking process for finding the main idea. Students begin by finding topics in sentences, then identify the main idea in a sentence. From here they move on to finding the focus of a paragraph, writing the main idea, and finally coming up with summary sentences for books.

Locating Information

Reading for comprehension. Packed with informative short stories, comprehension questions, and various research activities, this 23-lesson book provides valuable practice with the reading skills needed to locate specific information in written text. Each fact-based story is followed by questions that require students to locate the information in the story and give precise answers. Subjects covered range from “The Stars in the Sky” and “Amazons”, to “Komodo Dragons” and “Going Bananas”.

Making Inferences

This 23-lesson book provides valuable practice in the specific reading skill that emphasises inference comprehension. It’s packed with informative short stories, comprehension questions, and various research activities. The stories lack some facts that the reader must infer from the text in order to detect certain details. Questions following each story test student’s ability to recognise information that is implied but not directly given.

Reading to Understand

Critical reading, thinking, and understanding are required in order to answer the questions that follow each of the short articles in this 25-lesson book. Some of the questions call for factual answers found in the text. Other questions are based on the reader’s ability to apply logic, make inferences, recognise cause and effect, draw conclusions, and use reason to come up with answers. Clever illustrations pertaining to the topics are sometimes part of the comprehension process.

Reading for Details (Reading Level 3)

Effective reading and comprehension building exercises. After reading about “jumping beans”, “Clara Barton”, “tidal waves”, “yawning”, “neon signs” and more, students are challenged with a series of True/False statements. All 25 lessons in this illustrated book encourage young readers to absorb what they read so they have the information needed to determine if the follow-up statements ring true or false.

Reading for Details (Reading Level 4)

Effective reading and comprehension building exercises. After reading about “blue jeans”, “peanuts”, “putting on shoes”, “flying saucers” and more, students are challenged with a series of True/False statements. All 25 lessons in this illustrated book encourage young readers to absorb what they read so they have the information needed to determine if the follow-up statements ring true or false.