Introducing the Complete Comprehension: Fiction expansion pack!
For Complete Comprehension: Fiction users, Jennifer Serravallo has created an enhancement with response forms, rubrics, summaries, sticker templates, and planning forms for nine more titles to use alongside the 28 already in your kit! Best of all, this is Jen’s and Heinemann’s gift to you! Just log in to your online resources, and the materials will be there for you.
The expansion pack gives your students more choice in what they read for assessment and you more options for matching students’ interest with their assessment book.
We asked Jen about the expansion pack and why she felt it was so important to share it with you now.
Q: Why did you create this expansion pack?
A: At the time of the kit's release I chose from a limited that had to be in paperback and officially leveled. Since then, more titles have become available, which means more choices for your readers and for you.
I have sought out books with racial, religious, cultural, geographic, and gender diversity. When we look at our classroom libraries, the texts we choose to use in our teaching, and the titles we offer children for assessment, it’s critical we broaden the range of authors, storylines, and protagonists so that they see themselves reflected in what they are reading and so they can have an empathic reading experience with authors and characters who may be outside their community. All of the titles in the original collection are great books! I just wanted to add more options so that the offerings are more intentionally diverse.
Q: What level(s) are the new titles?
A: The expansion pack includes nine additional titles ranging from J–W. I recommend that whenever teachers offer students a book for assessment they give them a choice of six or more titles in the kit from a range of levels. With these new books, every reader in a classroom will now have more titles to choose from.
Q: And it’s free in a teacher’s online resources?
A: Yes, that was very important to me. All the materials a teacher needs to assess and evaluate student responses—response forms, planning forms, book summaries, rubrics, and printable stickers to place inside of books—are now available in the online resources for Complete Comprehension: Fiction. There’s no charge, they are simply there.
The only thing teachers or schools will need to get on their own are the printed trade books. They may have some already at school, or ay need to order them. Either way, it's crucial that the book that gets stickered up has the same ISBN as the one that was used to create the assessment. The list of the new titles and their ISBNs is in the online resources too. For quick and easy ordering, go here.
Q: So how does a teacher use it?
A: They only need to go to their registered online resources page on Heinemann.com to view or print all of the materials. If you have access to a color printer, I recommend you use that! If you'd like to print book labels, you'll need Avery© brand Easy Peel© Return Address Labels #8167 (1/2” x 1-3/4”), to feed into your printer. Otherwise, you use it exactly like you use the 28 books in the physical kit.
Q: What about nonfiction?
A: We are currently working on creating an expansion pack for nonfiction too! Stay tuned.
So go ahead and explore your Complete Comprehension: Fiction resources right now. We think you’ll find that this expansion pack will make an already flexible tool even more powerful.
Jennifer Serravallo is the author of New York Times’ bestseller The Reading Strategies Book as well as other popular Heinemann professional books, The Writing Strategies Book; Teaching Reading in Small Groups; and The Literacy Teacher's Playbook, Grades K–2 and Grades 3–6. Her newest titles are Teaching Writing in Small Groups (publishing March of 2021) and Connecting with Students Online, from which she will donate a portion of the proceeds to organizations serving children directly impacted by COVID-19. Her other recent books include Understanding Texts & Readers and A Teacher's Guide to Reading Conferences as well as the Spanish-language counterparts to her strategies books, El libro de estrategias de lectura and El libro de estrategias de escritura.
Jen’s Complete Comprehension: Fiction and Complete Comprehension: Nonfiction are assessment and teaching resources that expand upon the comprehension skill progressions from Understanding Texts & Readers and offer hundreds more strategies like those in The Reading Strategies Book.
Additionally, Jen is the author of the On-Demand Courses Strategies in Action: Reading and Writing Methods and Content and Teaching Reading in Small Groups: Matching Methods to Purposes, where you can watch dozens of videos of Jen teaching in real classrooms and engage with other educators in a self-guided course.
Jen is a member of Parents Magazine Board of Advisors for education and literacy. She began her career in education as a NYC public school teacher and later joined the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University. Through TCRWP, and now as an independent consultant, she has spent over a decade helping teachers across the country to create literacy classrooms where students are joyfully engaged and the instruction is meaningfully individualized to students' goals.
Jen holds a BA from Vassar College and an MA from Teachers College, where she has also taught graduate and undergraduate classes.
Learn more about Jen and her work at https://www.heinemann.com/jenniferserravallo/, on Twitter @jserravallo, on Instagram @jenniferserravallo, or by joining The Reading and Writing Strategies Facebook Community.