Making Connections: Reading Comprehension Made Meaningful and Easy

Making connections is an essential reading comprehension skill that helps students engage more deeply with texts by linking what they read to their own experiences, other texts and the world around them. When students learn to make text-to-self, text-to-text and text-to-world connections, they become more active readers who can better understand, interpret and remember what they have read.

This resource allows your students to practice making connections using age-appropriate sample texts. It includes five engaging short stories and a generic making connections graphic organizer available in three differentiated versions to support diverse learning needs. Students can use this graphic organizer to make text-to-self, text-to-text and text-to-world connections related to the text they have read.

The passages featured in this resource are:

1. The Backyard Rocket Ship
2. The Story of Pizza
3. The Message in a Bottle
4. The Final Inning 
5. Rachel’s New Team

These texts vary slightly in their readability levels to support differentiation.

This resource downloads as a black-and-white PDF or editable Google Slides file. 

Read on to learn how to use this versatile resource in your reading lessons.

Teaching Making Connections Reading Comprehension Skills and Strategies in Your Lessons

This versatile resource can be used in a variety of ways to teach your students how to make connections when reading. 

Here’s one suggested lesson overview that you may wish to follow:

1. Introduce the topic and activate prior knowledge – Begin by introducing one of the short stories. Encourage students to share their own experiences and ideas to help them connect with the text before reading.
2. Read the story and model your thinking – Read the story together. As you read, think aloud and model examples of text-to-self, text-to-text and text-to-world connections. This helps students see how proficient readers actively engage with a text.
3. Explore connections as a class – After reading, discuss the story and invite students to share connections they made while reading. Guide them to explain how these connections help them better understand the characters, events or message of the text.
4. Complete the graphic organizer – Distribute the appropriate differentiated graphic organizer and support students as they record their ideas. The scaffolded formats make it easy to cater for varying ability levels.
5. Share and reflect – Allow students to complete the organizer independently before sharing their responses with the class. This allows students to discover that readers can make different yet equally valuable connections to the same text.

Instantly Download These Making Connections Reading Comprehension Worksheets

Are you ready to get your hands on these making connections reading passages? Use the Download button above to access the full set of passages and accompanying worksheets.

As this resource contains answer pages, we recommend printing one copy of the entire file, then selecting and removing the pages you wish to photocopy for the students.

This resource was created by Tanya Bailey, a teacher in South Carolina and Teach Starter collaborator.

More Reading Comprehension (Making Connections) Resources From Teach Starter

Click below to browse and download more teacher-created, curriculum-aligned resources to use when teaching your students how to make text-to-self, text-to-text and text-to-world connections.

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Making Connections to Text Teaching Slides

Teach the reading comprehension skill of making connections to text with this ready-to-use, age-appropriate teaching presentation for 3rd and 4th grade students.

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Reading Response Templates - Complete Journal

A reading response journal for students to use to engage with text in meaningful and purposeful ways.

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Making Text Connections Graphic Organizer

A graphic organizer to use with students when making connections with a piece of text.