Determining Importance Lesson & Activities Nonfiction Reading Comprehension Crew

Let’s make determining importance in nonfiction text fun and exciting! Try the Comprehension Crew for teaching how to determine important details. Your students will be begging for more!

This resource includes everything you need to introduce and teach determining importance to your students. It also provides a consistent framework for continuous reinforcement and application of the skill with any text and with all future lessons.

Deko the Master of Determining Importance will help you teach this skill to your students in a way they will truly understand and internalize. Deko helps readers to figure out what details in a text are the most important. She helps them to differentiate between which details are interesting versus important.

This resource introduces concrete ways for students to interact with the reading skill through this character representation. This lesson format can be applied to any book over and over again! There are a variety of activities included in this resource for your students to practice determining importance. Google slide version is available!

*download the preview to learn more about the Comprehension Crew program

The resource includes the following:

• Character Posters & Visual Aids
• Character Profile- includes character profession, prop, gesture, phrase, likes, and how they help reader
• Concrete Activity
• Introduction & Modeling Determining Importance Lesson Plan- can be applied to any book
• Teacher Implementation Tips
• Graphic Organizers- 20 differentiated options for any text
• Flip Books- 3 options that can be used with any text
• Interactive Notebook
• Task Cards with Photographs- includes answer key and differentiated answer sheets
• Task Cards with Short Text- includes answer key and differentiated answer sheets
• Practice with Nonfiction Passages- differentiated texts and scaffolded response options with answer keys
• Mentor Text Suggestions – includes a wide variety of picture books and wordless picture books

What is the Comprehension Crew?

Comprehension Crew is a group of characters each representing an essential reading skill. Each character has a profession, gesture, and prop that provide a concrete representation of the reading skill. These characters are used to model and reinforce each skill both in life and in text. The character helps students to understand, remember, and intentionally apply skills as they are reading.

Who are the other Comprehension Crew characters?

Non-fiction reading skills:

determining importance
main idea
text features
text structure
vocabulary

inferencing
questioning
predicting
summarizing
clarifying
connecting- TRY FOR FREE!
synthesizing
evaluating
visualizing
theme

Teacher Reviews

1st grade teacher Miss Yetter said, “LOVE LOVE LOVE!!!! This made a very tricky concept so much more concrete for my kiddos!”

2nd grade teacher Gloria said, “Amazing resource! Love how kid-friendly it is with the character profile.”