Support your students in building deeper comprehension skills with our flexible Making Connections: General Comprehension Worksheets! This versatile resource helps learners practise the strategy of making meaningful connections between the text and their own lives, other texts, and the wider world. It can be used with any text type, making it an invaluable addition to any literacy program.

Making connections is a powerful comprehension strategy that enables students to better understand, relate to, and think critically about what they read. By encouraging students to link the text to their personal experiences, other texts, and real-world contexts, this resource promotes deeper thinking and stronger engagement with reading. These connections enhance comprehension by helping students create meaning beyond the text itself.

Making Connections: General Comprehension Worksheets can be used across the curriculum and with a wide variety of texts. Whether you are exploring fiction, non-fiction, poetry, media texts or even classroom content in other learning areas, this resource provides a clear and structured framework for developing thoughtful responses. With editable templates included, it is easy to adapt the worksheets to suit your students' needs or focus areas.

Key Learning Outcomes:

• ✅ Practise the comprehension strategy of making connections
• ✅ Link texts to personal experiences (Text-to-Self)
• ✅ Identify similarities between texts (Text-to-Text)
• ✅ Connect texts to real-world places, cultures, and events (Text-to-World)
• ✅ Strengthen critical thinking and comprehension skills across a wide range of texts

What’s Included:

• General comprehension worksheets focusing on:
  • Text-to-Self Connections
  • Text-to-Text Connections
  • Text-to-World Connections
• Templates provided in three formats:
  • Blank
  • 12mm lines
  • 9mm lines
• Available in PDF format for easy printing
• Fully editable version for customisation

Materials Needed:

• Printed Making Connections: General Comprehension Worksheets (choose your preferred format)
• Pencils and coloured pencils (optional)
• Selected text or text type for the comprehension activity

How to Use:

1. Select a text or text type for your students to read or listen to.
2. Model how to make text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections using think-aloud strategies.
3. Provide students with their chosen worksheet template (blank, 12mm, or 9mm lines).
4. Guide students through the process of making connections by asking targeted questions and encouraging discussion.
5. Students complete their worksheets by recording connections in writing and/or drawing.
6. Encourage students to share and discuss their connections with peers to promote deeper understanding.

Ideas for Classroom Use:

• 💡 Use during whole-class shared reading sessions to promote collaborative comprehension discussions.
• 💡 Include as part of your guided reading program to support small group thinking and response work.
• 💡 Provide as an independent reading task to deepen engagement and personal response to texts.
• 💡 Use as a reflection activity after reading a core text in your literacy unit.
• 💡 Pair with texts across the curriculum, including science, history, and media studies, to promote cross-curricular comprehension.

Top Teacher Tips:

• 💛 Enlarge worksheets to A3 for small group or whole-class modelling and discussion.
• 💛 Provide scaffolding and sentence starters for younger students or EAL/D learners to support rich responses.
• 💛 Encourage students to think beyond simple surface connections by prompting deeper thinking and justification.
• 💛 Use editable templates to tailor worksheets to suit a particular unit, genre, or focus text.

Making Connections: General Comprehension Worksheets provides a simple, flexible, and powerful way to strengthen comprehension skills across a wide range of texts and learning contexts. An essential tool for building thoughtful and reflective readers in your classroom!

This resource is part of our comprehensive Comprehension Strategies Workbook PACKAGE.