Teacher's edition accompanying each level of the program contains recommended strategic procedures for before, during, and after the reading of each text.
These include activating prior knowledge, establishing a purpose for reading monitoring comprehension, generating and answering questions, completing graphic organizerss, and summarizing.
One of the fratures of making Connections that differentiates it from most other programs on the market is the emphasis on strategic behavior during reading, especially monitoring comprehension to identify "trouble spots."
Children are encouraged to interact with the text and each other by circling unfamilar words and phrases as they read, in an attempt to resolve these comprehension difficulties.
The constant reinforcement that children receive to think strategically as they reflect on previously read texts in the Background Knowledge part of a lesson, as well as on all the texts in a unit via a feature called Text Connections, should help prepare them to view all reading tasks as problem-sloving opportunities.