Synthesizing Concrete & Engaging Lesson & Activities- Comprehension Crew

Are you searching for an interactive and captivating approach to instill essential reading skills like synthesizing in your elementary students? You’ve discovered it! This comprehensive synthesizing skills lesson plan and activities offer an engaging way to help your students effectively understand and apply this skill.

This resource includes everything you need to introduce and teach synthesizing 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.

Say hello to Shane The Synthesizer, your partner in helping students truly understand and internalize this critical skill. Shane approaches reading like a chef crafting a delicious dish, considering all the “ingredients” that influence understanding: connections, opinions, thoughts, feelings, and more. With Shane’s guidance, students gain the confidence to synthesize texts and enhance their comprehension.

With concrete representations through character portrayal, this resource facilitates active engagement with the reading skill. The lesson format can be seamlessly applied to any book, fostering repeated practice and reinforcement.

The resource includes the following:

Character Posters & Visual Aids *including ways to synthesize
Character Profile- includes character profession, theme song, prop, gesture, phrase, likes, and how they help reader
Concrete Synthesizing Activity
Introduction & Modeling Lesson Plan- can be applied to any book
Teacher Implementation Tips
Graphic Organizers- 44 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 Passages- differentiated texts and scaffolded response options with answer keys included (lower readability- Recess & higher readability- Field Day)

Bonus: Mentor Text Suggestions featuring picture books and wordless picture books
Updated version includes graphic organizers, worksheets, and posters in Google Slides for convenient student interaction!

What is the Comprehension Crew?

Comprehension Crew is a group of characters each representing an essential reading skill. Each character has a profession, song, 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?

There are characters representing each of the following reading skills:

• inferencing
• questioning
• predicting
• summarizing
• clarifying
• connecting- TRY FOR FREE!
• synthesizing
• evaluating
• visualizing
• theme
• determining importance
• main idea
• text features
• text structure
• vocabulary

Teacher Reviews

1st grade teacher Donnalyn said, “This is an amazing resource! I love the diverse activities. This resource supports concrete learners in grasping abstract concept like synthesizing. It really helped my students understand what synthesizing is and the purpose of readers synthesizing texts.”

3rd grade teacher Loni said, “I needed a supplemental resource to explain this concept to my third graders and this was very helpful. I liked the PowerPoint and anchor charts.”