A free, evidence-based toolkit supports teachers, schools, and families in building K–3 readers.
Picture two moments that happen on the same day. In a grade 2 classroom, a teacher practices a focal reading strategy—she pauses midway through a read-aloud to ask, “Why do you think the character made that choice?” A few hours later, a child from the same class climbs onto the couch with her grandfather reading a different book, and he asks a similar question: “What do you think happens next?” The conditions that support comprehension are not limited to the school day. They are built across the full ecology of a child’s learning life.
The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress results underscore why the learning communities young readers have access to, both in and out of school, matter. Grade 4 reading scores declined 5 points compared to 2019, and students performing below even the most basic level posted their worst results in more than 30 years. These are not abstract numbers. They represent children who had arrived in kindergarten ready to learn and who, by grade 4, had not received the support they needed to make meaning from the texts that science, social studies, and math now require.
That is the animating urgency behind the Toolkit for Teaching K–3 Reading Comprehension, a free professional learning resource developed by the Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) West at WestEd, which is funded by the Institute of Education Sciences. The toolkit was built to equip teachers with evidence-grounded practices and to extend that work beyond the classroom into the relationships between schools and the families and caregivers who are children’s first and most enduring teachers.
What the research says
The toolkit is a companion to the WWC practice guide Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade. That guide distills rigorous research into five recommendations: teaching comprehension strategies explicitly, teaching the structure of texts, leading rich text-based discussions, selecting texts purposefully, and building an engaging and motivating reading environment. Each recommendation applies in the classroom, and each has a meaningful counterpart at home.
Take explicit strategy instruction, for example. Strong readers do specific cognitive work when they engage with a text by activating background knowledge, drawing inferences, and monitoring their own understanding. Young children learn these strategic moves best when their teachers name the strategy, model their thinking aloud, practice it together, and then gradually hand the work to students. This gradual release of responsibility is a well-documented feature of effective reading instruction. And when caregivers at home engage children in specific cognitive work as they engage with a text, such as by asking “What do you already know about this topic?” or “Does that part make sense to you?” they are reinforcing exactly the same effective habits of mind.
Or consider leading rich text-based discussions. Comprehension grows most when students are pressed to reason from the text. This might look like posing questions with multiple defensible answers or following up to invite readers to say what in the text makes them think that. This kind of talk does not need to be confined to school. A caregiver who lingers over a story, asks a genuine question, and waits for a genuine answer is doing meaningful comprehension work. The research behind the toolkit recognizes this. It is why family activities were included to invite caregivers to join the conversation.
A design built for the entire Community of Practice
The toolkit takes a holistic approach to K–3 reading comprehension.
For teachers, the toolkit has multiple entry points, including a Teacher Study Group model, often organized by grade level, in which teachers move through new content together and then bring it directly into their classrooms. This model is based on what professional learning research conducted over decades has shown is effective. Specifically, teachers grow most when learning is collaborative, job-embedded, and tied to real student work. Each module in the toolkit follows the Learn, Plan, Apply, Reflect, Refine cycle so that new practices are tried, examined, and deepened over time.
Using the toolkit, leaders set the conditions that make classroom work possible. For school leaders and instructional coaches, the toolkit provides readiness checklists, facilitator guides, classroom observation tools, and schoolwide assessment resources that connect the professional learning to broader improvement goals.
For families and caregivers, the toolkit includes activity sheets designed to extend comprehension-building conversations from focusing on books to focusing on dinner table conversations and to focusing on the stories children bring home from school. These materials reflect an understanding that children’s reading lives do not begin and end at the school door, and caregivers are essential partners in building comprehension.
Everything needed, at no cost
The toolkit includes teacher modules with interactive activities, videos, and classroom case studies. It also includes participant workbooks, a facilitator’s guide, self-reflection and action-planning tools, lesson observation resources, schoolwide assessment tools, and family and caregiver activity sheets.
An invitation to everyone in a child’s reading life
K–3 teachers bring extensive expertise to their classrooms, and caregivers bring irreplaceable knowledge of their children. The toolkit invites teachers, school leaders, and families to look closely at a set of evidence-based practices—practices that many of them are already using in some form—and consider how to make these practices more intentional, consistent, and connected across the settings in which children learn.
Accessing the toolkit
The Toolkit for Teaching K–3 Reading Comprehension is free and available online: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/rel/reading-comprehension-k-3/
