C3. Critical Thinking in Literacy
Links to A3 Strand
Critical thinking is an important part of everyday teaching and learning. The skills that are introduced in early primary are the foundation from which more complex skills grow and develop through elementary and secondary school. The goal of this learning is to enhance students’ ability to engage thoughtfully with a variety of texts, fostering deeper comprehension and more informed responses.
Text Sets: What They Are and Why You Should Use Them
Text sets are collections of multiple texts—books, articles, videos, and more—organized around a common theme or topic. They offer varied perspectives and formats to deepen understanding, build vocabulary, and enhance comprehension. Educators use text sets to support integrated learning across subjects, allowing students to explore topics thoroughly through diverse sources, viewpoints, and forms.
Using text sets with a common topic focus to build knowledge within your everyday teaching and learning allows students to deepen their understanding of a subject through exposure to varied yet related content. Also, when you connect the learning to content areas (i.e., Science, Health, Social Studies), you are not only working on language skills, but also providing students with knowledge and information that will support their understanding of these other areas of the curriculum.
Here are a few key reasons why this cross-curricular approach is beneficial:
- Contextual Learning: When students read multiple texts on the same topic, they build a richer context and a more comprehensive understanding of the subject matter. This helps them make connections between different pieces of information and see how they fit together.
- Vocabulary Development: Reading about a common topic from multiple sources introduces students to key vocabulary repeatedly in different contexts. This repeated exposure helps reinforce word meanings and usage, enhancing their vocabulary knowledge and language skills.
- Critical Thinking: Engaging with various texts on the same topic encourages students to compare and contrast information, evaluate different perspectives, and synthesize new insights. This develops their critical thinking and analytical skills.
- Knowledge Building: Deepening knowledge in one area helps students build a solid foundation, which supports comprehension of more complex texts in the future. A strong knowledge base makes it easier for students to understand new information related to the topic.
- Engagement and Motivation: When students explore a topic of interest through different types of texts—stories, articles, diagrams, and videos—they are more likely to stay engaged and motivated. This variety keeps learning interesting and dynamic.
- Reading Skills Application: Working with a set of related texts allows students to apply comprehension strategies across different genres and formats. They can practice skills like summarizing, questioning, and inferring in varied contexts, building and strengthening their understanding of these strategies.
Curriculum Expectations
During Kindergarten, the focus was on:
In the 2016 Kindergarten program, the focus is on general ‘Literacy Behaviours’, as opposed to specific expectations. Here are the expectations that are outlined in the Kindergarten Program, as they related to reading comprehension:
- Listening to stories and texts
- Sharing ideas and responses to texts
- Learning that texts can communicate a message
- Express their thoughts and ideas with increasingly extensive and specialized vocabulary
- Ask and respond to questions that demonstrate and require predicting, making inferences, connecting, and critiquing
- Readers use the words, illustrations, and their prior experiences to make sense of text
New for Grade 1:
- Literary devices:
-rhyme
-alliteration
-onomatopoeia - Identify and sequence identifying important information and events
- Cultural elements represented in various texts and explaining how they contribute to meaning:
-symbols
-values - Identify explicit and implicit perspectives communicated in a text
- Identify thinking skills that helped them understand simple texts
- Express personal thoughts and feelings about ideas presented in texts, such as ideas about diversity, inclusion, accessibility
- Identify some ways in which texts created by First Nations, Metis, and Inuit individuals, communities, groups, or nations communicate about historical periods, cultural experiences, and events, and how they related to current lived experiences
Note: This is not an exhaustive list of all expectations in this strand. For a more detailed view, please see the official Ontario curriculum.
Further Reading
- See resources on the C. Reading Comprehension page
Suggested Resources
- See resources on the C. Reading Comprehension page
