Reading Detective Rx

I love this books for helping students zone in on skills that are important for testing well. I love that it’s written at a level that doesn’t bog students down with difficult vocabulary. This keeps the focus on building the specific skill we’re working on.

I am a middle school special education teacher that teaches 6-8th grade resource room. I go through each one as an "informal unit" in the resource room as supplemental/intervention to their general education curriculum. I have used it since August and today, we received our mid year progress data. Most of my students have jumped 1-2 grade levels at just mid year! Every one of my students from 11-13 year old LOVES these worksheets and doing Reading Detective! They amaze me with their peaked interest in the articles and their extreme focus in answering the following questions. I see them get more and more correct every time we go through a skill such as Main Idea. I will continue to purchase the other volumes!

The Reading Detective series, in general, is great for teachers looking to build students' critical thinking skills with text analysis. The passages are challenging enough, and the questions engage students in more than just rote memory and spit-back. That said, I highly recommend the A1 and B1 volumes of Reading Detective, mainly because of their robust sections of professional-author-written passages. Browsing through the Rx volume, I find many of the passages are written by the book's authors, not by professional authors of fiction. While this does not eliminate the rigor of the passages or the challenge of the questions, it does minimize the usefulness of THIS PARTICULAR version as an addition to a literature or great books curriculum. I have no doubt that this version, like its other volumes, helps to build student critical thinking; I just would have liked to see more reliance on literature, especially at the 6-12+ grade levels.

Great for struggling readers. I teach a middle school resource class, and this is a great collection of articles and stories. One of the best parts is that every sentence is numbered, and the students are asked to 'prove their answers' by identifying the exact sentence from where they got their information. The articles are high interest. One eighth grade boy with a 4-year reading gap who never comments or cares about literature was so annoyed by one of the articles about gum flying into a student's hair, he proceeded to detail to the class for 5 minutes all the things he hated about the article. For 5 minutes. With detailed examples, constructive criticism, predictions and inference. On and on. See where I'm going with this? Highly recommend.

I actually ordered this for my husband who is a high school English teacher, grades 9 and 10. He says it is one of the best resource books he's used in the past ten years. It is well aligned with both Common Core and ACT Aspire testing. It has both comprehension questions, and higher level questions to assess student understanding. Along with these questions, students are asked to pull evidence from the story to support their answers, which is a critical skill in both Common Core and ACT Aspire.

This is great for RTI or remediation, though many of the readings are on a 4-6 grade level. It breaks skills down, with a unit for main idea, theme, figurative language, vocabulary, and more. There are more than one reading skill as well, which is great! All of the answers are provided in the back of the book.

I use the other books in this series specified on reading and I really like how they are set up so this was a nice expansion. It covers grades 6-12 so it leaves room for growth but it also allows you to use it for older struggling readers.

Product is great and is very useful for online activities as schools are currently closed. Delivered fast and on time .